Conditions and diseases

6,926 articles · Since 2005

Physicians writing on KevinMD about the diseases they treat and the people who have them: cancer and its screening arguments, pain and the drugs that treat it, diabetes and the obesity argument, mental illness and who gets treated for it, and the decisions at the end of a life. Five maintained records draw on this archive: Cancer: what physicians say, in their own words, Opioids: what physicians and pain patients say, in their own words, End of life: what physicians say, in their own words, Diabetes and obesity: what physicians say, in their own words, and Mental health: what psychiatrists and physicians say, in their own words.

Latest articles

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, …

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 …

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 …

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Why the physics of a PET scan depends on antimatter

Jack Tiller

October 16, 2026Oct 16, 2026

Most people, including plenty of us still in medical training, know the basics of a PET scan on the surface. PET stands for positron emission tomography; patients get injected with a radioactive glucose tracer called fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG), and areas of high metabolic activity light up on the scan. What gets left unsaid is everything underneath it: what a positron actually is, why it exists at all, and how the answer …

Patient education after the visit is a design problem

Keith Schmidt, MD

October 15, 2026Oct 15, 2026

A patient can leave a medical appointment with an explanation, a printed instruction sheet, and a question that has not occurred to them yet. The question may arrive while arranging a ride, talking to a spouse, or looking at the…

A patient can leave a medical appointment with an explanation, a printed instruction sheet, and a question that has not occurred to them yet.

The question may arrive while arranging a ride, talking to a spouse, or looking at the calendar the evening before a procedure. It may be simple enough that the practice answers it many times a week. For that patient, at that moment, it is the missing piece …

Cultural humility in psychiatry begins with curiosity

Dr. Loshi Rajen

October 14, 2026Oct 14, 2026

Quite recently, I requested a colleague to proofread a piece of my writing. When I asked for feedback, his reply through the text bubbles on WhatsApp read: "I have not been chanced to go through it." The meaning of it…

Quite recently, I requested a colleague to proofread a piece of my writing. When I asked for feedback, his reply through the text bubbles on WhatsApp read: “I have not been chanced to go through it.”

The meaning of it was perfectly clear. Yet I caught myself correcting his sentence almost automatically in my head. Once I caught myself in the act, I stopped abruptly. I found myself wondering whether the …

What we are saving when we keep a father alive in the ICU

Dr. Prashant Bankar

October 13, 2026Oct 13, 2026

He was critically ill. During one conversation, his wife told me that their young children believed their father had gone out of town for work and would be home soon. They were too young, she felt, to understand why he…

Until then, I had been thinking about how to keep him alive. After that conversation, I found myself thinking about the children …

Responsible healthmaxxing starts with a stopping rule

Fayez Ajib, DO

October 13, 2026Oct 13, 2026

Wellness culture has become very good at telling people what else they could measure, buy, restrict, stack, or optimize. The newer language of "healthmaxxing" packages that instinct into a single word. At its most extreme, it can turn an ordinary…

Wellness culture has become very good at telling people what else they could measure, buy, restrict, stack, or optimize. The newer language of “healthmaxxing” packages that instinct into a single word. At its most extreme, it can turn an ordinary life into an endless intervention: more supplements, more tests, tighter routines, higher scores, and less tolerance for uncertainty.

The criticism of that version is justified. A routine is not responsible simply …

How I healed a dysregulated nervous system after burnout

J.H. Lynn

October 13, 2026Oct 13, 2026

My reckoning arrived in the form of sudden heart palpitations that felt like a physical warning siren. After weeks of intense, recession-era financial pressure, endless work travel, and nights that blurred into early mornings, my body staged a quiet mutiny. I tried to rationalize the symptoms away. I tried to “push through” the fatigue, attempting to remain the resilient high-performer who didn’t need help. Sadly, human physiology does not negotiate …

Dopamine agonist withdrawal is a foreseeable injury

Jessica Fausnaugh

October 12, 2026Oct 12, 20263

Dopamine agonist withdrawal syndrome (DAWS). That is its name. Named in the literature since 2010. Diagnostic criteria exist. It affects, by conservative estimate, one in five to one in four patients who taper off these drugs. This is not a mystery ailment. It is a known, foreseeable medical injury, and foreseeable harm that goes unwarned and unmonitored is not bad luck. It is a failure of duty. If this profession …

Chronic kidney disease can hide behind a normal blood test

Dr. Girishkumar Modi

October 12, 2026Oct 12, 2026

A normal creatinine result can be reassuring. But for someone with diabetes, high blood pressure, or another risk factor for kidney disease, it may answer only part of the question. Creatinine helps us estimate how well the kidneys filter blood. It does not tell us whether albumin, a protein normally kept in the bloodstream, is leaking into the urine. Before we describe a kidney assessment as complete, we should know …

Sleep apnea and depression: Screen before a third drug

Ravi Singareddy, MD

October 12, 2026Oct 12, 2026

In a community study of 700 men, 43 percent of those who had both obstructive sleep apnea and insomnia met criteria for depression. That compared with 22 percent of those with insomnia alone and just 8 percent of those with…

That gradient captures something most of us see every week but rarely name. The patient who comes to me on referral has usually cycled through two or three …

Organ procurement and the 1,784-day wait that changed me

John C. Springer, CST

October 12, 2026Oct 12, 2026

I used to believe that reverence required silence. Years ago, when I first stood at the table during an organ procurement, I carried an expectation that now feels almost childlike in its purity. I wanted the room to feel sacred.…

I used to believe that reverence required silence.

Years ago, when I first stood at the table during an organ procurement, I carried an expectation that now feels almost childlike in its purity. I wanted the room to feel sacred. I wanted the air itself to acknowledge that a human being, still warm, still perfused, still carrying the quiet dignity of a life recently lived, lay before us. I expected every …

Digital eye strain may be masking dry eye disease

Pam Theriot, OD

October 11, 2026Oct 11, 2026

More than 16 million Americans are estimated to have a diagnosis of dry eye disease. And the number of symptomatic patients living without a diagnosis is thought to be almost double. As a health care provider, these patients come through your office every day. You can help them get the care they need before suffering from a significant decrease in their workplace productivity, or an increase in symptoms of anxiety …

Why does the male infertility evaluation start so late?

Justin Houman, MD

October 11, 2026Oct 11, 2026

Three years into their infertility workup, after a second failed transfer, a couple came to see me. She had been the patient that entire time. Hysterosalpingogram, diagnostic laparoscopy, two retrievals, somewhere north of $40,000 that their insurance didn’t touch. He came to the appointment because their REI had finally suggested it, and I think he was mostly there to be supportive.

He brought a folder. In it was a semen analysis …

I was wrong: Doctors who listen still exist

Christopher H. Foster, PhD, MPA

October 9, 2026Oct 9, 2026

The last time I wrote for KevinMD, I asked, "What happened to real care in health care?" I was tired of commercial after commercial promising that a new drug could fix nearly anything. I was frustrated by the steady stream…

The last time I wrote for KevinMD, I asked, “What happened to real care in health care?” I was tired of commercial after commercial promising that a new drug could fix nearly anything. I was frustrated by the steady stream of new labels and acronyms that sometimes make ordinary human struggles sound like conditions waiting for a prescription. That frustration was personal, but it was not entirely imagined. From …

Measuring autism treatment progress beyond therapy hours

EarliPoint Health

October 9, 2026Oct 9, 2026

One of the things I value most in medicine is our ability to ask a seemingly simple question: Is the treatment working? In many areas of medicine, we have objective measures that help us answer it. When caring for a…

One of the things I value most in medicine is our ability to ask a seemingly simple question: Is the treatment working?

In many areas of medicine, we have objective measures that help us answer it. When caring for a child with diabetes, we can follow hemoglobin A1C. When managing hypertension, we monitor blood pressure. Those measurements do not replace the physician’s judgment or the patient’s experience. They give us another …

Can nervous system regulation reduce the pull of cravings?

Jorina Elbers, MD

October 9, 2026Oct 9, 2026

Addiction is often understood as a behavioral response to a craving. But beneath the urge to use, something else is happening: A person is trying to change how they feel. Trauma can fundamentally alter our sense of safety in the…

Addiction is often understood as a behavioral response to a craving. But beneath the urge to use, something else is happening: A person is trying to change how they feel.

Trauma can fundamentally alter our sense of safety in the world. When we don’t feel safe, the nervous system activates its innate defenses, which can leave us feeling anxious and hypervigilant, or emotionally numb and shut down. Over time, the nervous …

Whole-person care starts where the specialties stop

MaryBeth Asenime, DC, PMHNP-BC

October 9, 2026Oct 9, 2026

I have had thousands of first appointments. I knew within thirty seconds that this one was going to matter. She was not hopeful. She made that clear before she even sat down. She had been to enough offices, received enough referrals, and heard enough versions of the same answer that she had stopped expecting a different one.

She looked at me and asked directly, “Are you going to help me, or …

How to catch functional decline before discharge day

Pradeepika Samagh, DPT, MBA

October 8, 2026Oct 8, 2026

We know when a patient's laboratory values have improved. We know when the infection has cleared, the fracture has been repaired, or the heart failure has stabilized. But before declaring treatment successful, we should ask a more ordinary and often…

We know when a patient’s laboratory values have improved. We know when the infection has cleared, the fracture has been repaired, or the heart failure has stabilized. But before declaring treatment successful, we should ask a more ordinary and often more consequential question:

Can this person safely get out of bed?

Too often, health care discovers the answer only when discharge is approaching. Rehabilitation is then asked to solve, in a matter …

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