| KevinMD.com

October 18, 2026Oct 18, 2026

Few of us would tell a patient with moderate-to-severe depression to wait it out alone. Many of us do exactly that for ourselves. Physicians develop depression at rates comparable to or higher than the general population, yet we are among…

A 2025 JAMA strategic review found that fear of stigma was a primary barrier to seeking help for …

Physician voices

Your physician mindset is keeping you on the hamster wheel

Tracy Gapin, MD

October 18, 2026Oct 18, 2026

You've been trained to obey and execute. To be the operator, the one grinding, reacting, and doing the work others have designed for you. Medical school taught you to follow protocols. Residency taught you to work within systems. Your career…

You’ve been trained to obey and execute. To be the operator, the one grinding, reacting, and doing the work others have designed for you. Medical school taught you to follow protocols. Residency taught you to work within systems. Your career has reinforced the pattern of being the highly skilled technician who executes what others decide.

Someone else decides how much time you can spend with patients. Someone else determines what treatments …

Health technology

Judge AI in health care by its worst answer, not its best

Brian Hudes, MD

October 18, 2026Oct 18, 2026

Health care's AI conversation is moving from documentation to decision. The pitch, repeated across the industry, is that we should stop using AI merely to write our notes and start using it to improve the decisions those notes record: to…

Health care’s AI conversation is moving from documentation to decision. The pitch, repeated across the industry, is that we should stop using AI merely to write our notes and start using it to improve the decisions those notes record: to surface risks, close care gaps, and deliver “actionable intelligence” inside the workflow. The ambition is reasonable. But it quietly raises the stakes on a problem the documentation era let us …

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Health technology

How to match your ambient AI scribe to visit complexity

Christina Johns, MD

October 18, 2026Oct 18, 2026

The future of health care offers flexibility in if, how, and when providers adopt AI documentation, but the true priority is finding a middle ground where practicing medicine still feels natural. Having access to dynamic documentation options lets clinicians set…

Rather than forcing every clinical encounter into a certain type of AI option, health care-specific platforms that offer distinct AI-supported tiers allow …

The Podcast by KevinMD

Why the surgical backlog starts with how surgeons are trained [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

October 17, 2026Oct 17, 2026

Surgical training still runs on the model it did decades ago. Everything around it has changed. Danny Goel walks you through what that mismatch costs. He is an orthopedic surgeon, and this episode is based on his article "In 2026,…

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Patient voices

Emergency medicine: a tribute and call to action from an old friend

John Holstein

October 17, 2026Oct 17, 20262

I write to you as a person with four decades of experience on the business side of health care, specifically in the revenue cycle industry. Importantly in those forty years, the overwhelming majority of my time was spent serving all of you in emergency medicine. At the outset of this article, I wish to express my appreciation and gratitude to each, and every one of you, for the opportunity to …

Physician voices

Why the annual physical shortchanges patients and doctors

Acey Albert, MD

October 17, 2026Oct 17, 20263

A patient called my office last month asking if she could "just get her labs done" without coming in. She wasn't being difficult. She'd had the same panel run every year for a decade, felt fine, and didn't see why…

A patient called my office last month asking if she could “just get her labs done” without coming in. She wasn’t being difficult. She’d had the same panel run every year for a decade, felt fine, and didn’t see why a 15-minute conversation needed to precede a blood draw. Another patient, a few weeks later, arrived for his physical with a list of eleven things he wanted addressed: three medication …

Health policy

Health care transformation can’t wait for the next crisis

Paul Dranichnikov, MD, PhD

October 17, 2026Oct 17, 2026

Health care has a problem that we rarely talk about honestly enough. It is not simply a shortage of doctors. It is not simply rising costs, longer waiting lists, an aging population, or the growing burden of chronic disease. The…

The deeper problem is that we are trying to run 21st-century health care on an operating system designed for another era. Our populations are living longer. Patients are more informed, more demanding, …

Health policy

What nurse strikes reveal about patient safety risks

Cara Lunsford, RN

October 17, 2026Oct 17, 2026

By the time nurses decide to strike, the reasons have likely been building for quite some time. There have already been twenty health care strikes reported in 2026, many of which are nurses pushing for more than just better pay.…

By the time nurses decide to strike, the reasons have likely been building for quite some time.

There have already been twenty health care strikes reported in 2026, many of which are nurses pushing for more than just better pay. Every strike has its own circumstances, but leaders shouldn’t wait for a walkout to ask what nurses need.

I’ve spent enough time in nursing to know that nurses will keep showing …

Conditions and diseases

Coverage for pharmacogenomic testing hinges on your insurer

Houda Hachad, PharmD

October 17, 2026Oct 17, 2026

Imagine two patients sitting in the same clinic. They have the same diagnosis, are being considered for the same medication, and have the same clinical reason for drug-gene (also known as pharmacogenomic, or PGx) testing. For one patient, the test is covered. For the other, it is not. The difference may have little to do with the clinical evidence. It may come down to their insurance.

That is the access problem …

Medical education

The real test of an AI tutor is what learners do without it

John Sullivan, MD, PhD

October 17, 2026Oct 17, 2026

Dr. Fady Hannah-Shmouni's recent KevinMD essay, "Continuing medical education needs a tutor, not a lecture," makes a case I share without reservation. Slide decks and ten-question quizzes survive because they are easy to accredit, not because they necessarily produce durable…

Dr. Fady Hannah-Shmouni’s recent KevinMD essay, “Continuing medical education needs a tutor, not a lecture,” makes a case I share without reservation. Slide decks and ten-question quizzes survive because they are easy to accredit, not because they necessarily produce durable learning. An AI tutor that presents a case, waits for the clinician’s answer, and probes the reasoning behind it is far closer to how expertise actually develops.

His guardrails are …

Physician voices

6 lessons from William Osler for emergency medicine

Dr. Rida Jawed

October 17, 2026Oct 17, 2026

Emergency medicine has changed dramatically since Sir William Osler practiced medicine. Our departments now run on rapid triage, bedside ultrasound, advanced imaging, resuscitation protocols, electronic records, and increasingly sophisticated decision tools. Yet some of the hardest parts of the job…

Yet some of the hardest parts of the job have changed very little. We still make decisions with incomplete information. We still care for frightened patients and families on some of the worst days of their lives. We still make …

The Podcast by KevinMD

Heart and brain got the investment; the musculoskeletal system did not [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

October 16, 2026Oct 16, 2026

You can learn more from watching a patient walk down the hallway than from the rest of the exam. Most exams happen sitting or lying down. Narinder Singh Parhar is an internal medicine physician and founder of Jeeva Health Systems.…

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Conditions and diseases

Closing the gender pain gap takes more than awareness

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

October 16, 2026Oct 16, 2026

Women experience more pain than men across virtually every region of the body, yet their symptoms remain systematically under-recognized, delayed in diagnosis, and undertreated. A landmark 2026 global analysis published in Nature Medicine, which was drawing on self-reported data from more than 6.1 million people across 118 countries, confirmed that women report higher pain prevalence at all 11 anatomical sites examined, including the head, face, neck/shoulder, back, abdomen, hips, …

Conditions and diseases

When to refer a child for cochlear implant candidacy

Samantha P. Scharf, AuD

October 16, 2026Oct 16, 2026

Pediatric hearing loss is far more common than many recognize, standing as one of the most frequent congenital conditions diagnosed in the United States. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that approximately 1 to 2 out of every 1,000 infants who undergo a newborn hearing screening have a detectable level of hearing loss. Thanks to universal newborn hearing screenings, which were implemented at the …

Physician finance

Incapacity planning is about authority, not family

Mike Chando, MBA

October 16, 2026Oct 16, 2026

In a recent KevinMD podcast, palliative physician Kirsten Engel and writer Medha Tripathi described a patient they called Mr. L. He was dying in the hospital. He could not speak for himself, no family visited, and he had never named…

The team believed comfort measures and hospice would serve him best. In his case, decisions of that weight …

Health technology

Clinical AI accountability does not come with your EHR

Brian Hudes, MD

October 16, 2026Oct 16, 2026

In a recent essay on Epic and Oracle, Eric Doherty argued that health care leaders should not pick a side. They should demand AI that is trustworthy, portable, and patient-centered. I agree. But that is the beginning of the accountability…

In a recent essay on Epic and Oracle, Eric Doherty argued that health care leaders should not pick a side. They should demand AI that is trustworthy, portable, and patient-centered. I agree.

But that is the beginning of the accountability question, not the end. Once the technology is in use (drafting the note, suggesting the code, proposing the order, flagging the patient), who verifies that it keeps performing as expected? Who …

Health technology

Waitlist software fills fewer than half the slots it offers

Karan Kanwar

October 16, 2026Oct 16, 2026

During the vaccine rollout, an opened vial gave a clinic six to twelve hours to use every dose. State and local health authorities told sites to keep standby lists so unused doses could be given before they expired. A canceled…

A canceled appointment carries a deadline of its own, printed in the schedule: the appointment time. The room and the clinician are there for that hour whether or not a patient fills it, …

Conditions and diseases

Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak: no proven vaccine, no shortcut

Melvin Sanicas, MD

October 16, 2026Oct 16, 2026

The current Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is becoming an important test of how well the global health system can respond when a dangerous pathogen emerges without a licensed vaccine specifically proven to protect against…

Recent reports highlight the same lesson from different angles: Controlling outbreaks such as this requires much more than a single medical countermeasure. It depends on the …

Physician voices

An insurance denial kept my patient from end-of-life care

Sameen Farooq, MD

October 16, 2026Oct 16, 2026

My patient lay in the hospital bed approaching end of life. We had a plan to get the patient to an inpatient setting for active symptom management for end-of-life care. Everything was in place until we got a denial from the insurance for coverage for inpatient end-of-life care. The reason for denial was “lack of medical necessity.” The rage I have felt experiencing this situation over my decade-long experience as …