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Most physicians who feel stuck in a job could actually afford to leave. They just can’t stomach what the worst week might look like. Stanley Liu, cardiologist and fiduciary financial planner, discusses the KevinMD article “Physician career choices come down to …
Why physicians stay in jobs they could afford to leave [PODCAST]
At two in the morning, grief looked like psychosis.
I remember being irritated before I even saw her. At the time, I was working back home in Malaysia. The emergency department fluorescent lights were too bright, my head heavy with interrupted sleep, the air-conditioning turned low enough that the corridors felt vaguely refrigerated. Someone from the emergency department had telephoned psychiatry on call (me) requesting an urgent review of an elderly …
The night I almost diagnosed grief as mental illness
This article is sponsored by Tonal.
The problem was never that doctors do not understand the value of strength training. It is that the schedule does not leave room for it. The day starts before dawn and ends long after the last note is signed. Between back-to-back patients, charting, and …
The home gym built for doctors with no time
“Time of death, 17:49.”
“Let’s pause for a moment of silence.”
Stillness settles over the room. What had been a flurry of activity becomes something different. Something reverent. Sixty seconds pass.
“Thank you.”
There is a collective exhale, followed by a harsh realization. We must now move into cruel acceptance, into a place where hope no longer lives. With two words, I have ushered in a new reality.
A reality in which a mother lost …
Bearing witness in medicine begins after time of death
I arrived in the United States from India with one goal: become an excellent physician. That was the entire plan. Get through residency. Pass your boards. Build a clinical reputation. Publish research. Maybe land a faculty position at an academic medical center. Stay on the path.
For immigrant physicians, the path is narrower than most people realize. You don’t have a family network in American medicine. You don’t have alumni connections …
Immigrant physicians can do more than practice medicine
On June 29, 2026, psychologist Adam Omary published a landmark observation in the Boston Globe, titled “The disability accommodation trap on college campuses.” As he observed:
“It was well-intentioned when the Americans with Disabilities Act was amended in 2008 to include mental health conditions and learning disabilities as eligible for accommodations. But in practice, it created incentives for overdiagnosis. As The Harvard Crimson reported in December, the share of …
Why psychiatric overdiagnosis fails the students who suffer
As our understanding of obesity as a chronic disease has evolved, one paradox has been the ongoing barriers to accessing effective therapeutics for this condition, an approach vastly different from the way we treat other chronic diseases like heart disease, hypertension, or cerebrovascular disease.
Thankfully, that era has ended, and in July of this year, Medicare will begin covering access to GLP-1s for the treatment of obesity.
Why is this important for …
What is the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge program?
Health care professionals are trained to diagnose, decide, and act under pressure. Yet one of the most important factors influencing clinical judgment, patient trust, and resilience is often overlooked: emotional self-regulation.
Emotional regulation is not just a personal wellness practice that clinicians might pursue outside work to reduce stress or improve work-life balance. Today, it is increasingly being recognized as an essential clinical competency to practice, to reset, and to renew …
Can emotional regulation in medicine reduce errors?
Multiple news sources have recently pointed out massive layoffs in the technology industry due to artificial intelligence (AI) improvements that lead to job redundancy. During an interview with Jimmy Fallon, Bill Gates expressed a vision where in the future AI will replace health care providers and other service professionals. A sentiment that is shared throughout the tech industry.
In health care, the first wave of AI-related workforce adjustment has …
Are physicians next in AI health care layoffs?
I think the battle for health care is lost.
It started with HMOs in the 1980s and 1990s, which turned doctors into assembly-line workers. It got worse with the supposedly protective measure of work-hour restrictions, further turning a “calling” into a “job.” That well-intended change had several unintended consequences. It shifted the applicant pool for medical school toward people who wanted to clock out at 5 p.m. A sense of responsibility …
Universal health care after a calling became a job
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A patient with a dying leg won’t drive 20 miles for care. In Devin Zarkowsky’s town, that’s not a hypothetical. Vascular surgeon Devin Zarkowsky runs a solo office-based practice in a San Diego County town where peripheral arterial disease patients had nowhere …
When local doctors disappear, patients pay the price [PODCAST]
Last week a patient came in after his third ER visit in four months. Dizziness, near-syncope, and two falls. He has Parkinson’s disease and has been on carbidopa-levodopa for six years. His blood pressure in my office was 128/82 sitting. Completely normal.
That number told me almost nothing.
What I needed was his blood pressure lying down and again after standing for three minutes. I needed the reading he took at home …
Falls, syncope, and the orthostatic hypotension we miss
Nobody is asking this out loud. They should be.
Consider any mid-sized American city. A physician shortage that predates the pandemic. A growing population. Enough employer density to attract outside capital. A physician opens an independent concierge or DPC practice. The panel fills. The model works. The relationship medicine covenant holds.
Then the room changes.
Private equity is reshaping concierge medicine
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As an emergency medicine physician, we’ve all had that hysterical patient. The one that comes in during a busy shift grabbing at their head, their chest, their abdomen. Yelling out that they are in pain as they roll by.
You know the one. They make the nurses’ eyes roll. They add to an already chaotic scene. Other patients stop to watch as the gurney passes.
You debate how long you’re going to …
The difficult patient in the ER is often the sickest
“There are moments in medicine that transform a medical graduate into a physician.”
Every July, thousands of newly graduated physicians begin residency. They arrive with crisp white coats, fresh medical degrees, and years of scientific knowledge. But July 1 is more than the first day of residency. It is the start of a professional and personal transformation.
There is another curriculum, however, that receives far less attention. It has no syllabus, no …
The hidden curriculum no residency teaches
In 1999, researcher Dr. Kathleen Mosier placed 25 experienced pilots in a high-tech flight simulator. Her goal was to measure their response to inaccurate automated alerts. When cockpit instruments indicated an engine fire, the protocol was to verify the condition with other sensors. Instead, every one of the 25 pilots shut down the affected engine, responding to the false positive warning, an error of commission. In another scenario, the simulated …
Automation bias is the new medical error
Every year, my desk fills with increasingly complex paperwork. School systems, testing boards, and corporate human resources departments request formal validation to grant specific accommodations, most commonly extended time or modified environments, for individuals diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. As a psychiatrist who has spent decades observing the human condition, I find myself increasingly reluctant to sign these forms.
This hesitation does not stem from skepticism about the condition itself. …
Why I hesitate to sign ADHD accommodation forms
I am approaching a period of my life marked by multiple surgeries, procedures that may limit my voice for a time, or perhaps silence it altogether. I do not mention this to invite sympathy. I mention it because bearing witness requires speaking while one still can. It requires naming the truth before the body quiets, before recovery reshapes the days ahead, before the opportunity to speak freely is interrupted by …
Bearing witness in medicine before my voice goes quiet
We live in a world of over 5 billion global internet users, all connected in ways we have never seen before. We get to see the most secretive parts of people’s private lives: their morning routines, their shower routines, and their “Day in the Life” vlogs.
Yet, for decades, the daily work of a doctor remained a hidden mystery, at least to anyone outside the medical world. It wasn’t like a …
Why real medical experts must become medical influencers
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A week off does not fix burnout. The same problems are waiting when you get home, and the same person is walking back into them. Stacey Funt is a radiologist who runs a boutique wellness adventure travel company, mostly for women in …
How immersive travel can reshape identity and habits [PODCAST]
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