Conditions and Diseases

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.

Vitamin K refusal is a systems failure, not a parental one

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

July 30, 2026

I trained in the era when newborn care was a choreography, not a ritual, not a preference, but a sequence built from epidemiology, autopsy reports, and the memories of children we could not save. In the nursery, two injections and a few simple prophylactic steps prevented the worst horrors of early infancy:

Vitamin K IM: To prevent catastrophic late-onset vitamin K deficiency bleeding (VKDB)
Hib vaccine: To eliminate epiglottitis and …
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Vitamin K refusal is a systems failure, not a parental one

When the DEA became my patient’s doctor

Bill Bauer, MD, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

July 30, 2026

I have practiced neurology for more than fifty years. I have treated patients with refractory neuropathic pain, central pain syndromes, spinal cord injuries, and the cruel mix of conditions that fall under no clean diagnostic label. I have watched patients who were finally stable, finally sleeping, finally functioning, lose their prescriptions not because their physicians did anything wrong, but because the government decided that looking different on paper is the …

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When the DEA became my patient’s doctor

Why a psychiatric diagnosis is not a biological target

Nebyou Belay, MD

Conditions and Diseases

July 29, 2026

“I have a lot of anxiety and stress. Can I get Prozac, Lexapro, or something like that?”

“My moods are all over the place. One moment I’m happy, the next I’m sad, the next I’m enraged. Can I get a mood stabilizer?”

I hear requests like these constantly. They’re completely understandable. They also reflect a common misunderstanding: that psychiatry works the way the rest of medicine does, where a symptom leads straight …

The male loneliness epidemic hiding behind success

J.H. Lynn

Conditions and Diseases

July 29, 2026

Clinicians often meet men like K at the exact moment their lives start to quietly unravel. They don’t walk in using the language of distress. They show up looking competent, composed, and in control, even as something inside them is slipping. What looks like a business crisis is often an emotional one, driven by shame, isolation, and the belief that suffering must be carried alone.

This story and topic could easily …

Anticipatory anxiety about AI is showing up in clinic

Dr. Simbiat Adighije

Conditions and Diseases

July 29, 2026

I just finished watching Daniel Kokotajlo’s interview on The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett and reading his full AI 2027 publication in its entirety, and I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that this conversation, one that has clearly sparked a wave of public unease since it aired, is a preview of what I’m already starting to see in the clinic. A patient recently described …

The best gluten-free Trader Joe’s finds to grab now

Tami Burdick

Conditions and Diseases

July 29, 2026

This article is for those living or needing to live a gluten-free lifestyle, but still also appreciate a good guide for the grocery store too. Up to 15 percent of Western countries avoid gluten. By the year 2030 there could be up to 600 million people worldwide avoiding gluten, and those numbers could influence a buyers market of a whopping $13.67 billion.

So what is gluten in a nutshell? It’s a …

Patient experience in clinical trials starts with kindness

Regina Portnoy

Conditions and Diseases

July 29, 2026

Patients may not remember every lab draw, procedure, or study visit. But they will remember how they felt.

One of the greatest privileges of working in clinical research for more than 20 years has been meeting extraordinary people. Clinical research is often associated with science, data, and innovation. While those elements are essential, there is also a deeply human side to this industry. Behind every study, treatment, and medical advancement are …

Moral injury doesn’t care how many hours you worked

Sarah A. Vlach, MD

Conditions and Diseases

July 28, 2026

I am not a Mormon male. But for fifteen years, I had been doing a remarkably good impression of one. And then, on a Wednesday evening in May 2026, I was outed.

The termination letter was two pages, formal and bloodless. Ninety days’ notice, effective August 31. “With or without cause,” it said, a phrase that is perfectly designed to be both legally protective and humanly devastating. It was signed by …

What does humor in medicine actually do to the body?

Andrea Hayes, MD

Conditions and Diseases

July 28, 2026

An excerpt from Peach Cobbler Is Not a Fruit.

Laughter is good medicine. I don’t merely believe that. I have prescribed it, inhaled it, survived by it, and, on more than one occasion, snorted it through my nose at profoundly inappropriate moments.

Medicine is serious business. Patients entrust their bodies, fears, secrets, and occasionally their entire futures to the care and judgment of their physicians. The work demands rational thought, scientific …

Is your patient a candidate for tobacco harm reduction?

Edward Anselm, MD

Conditions and Diseases

July 28, 2026

Many lifelong cigarette smokers and their doctors have pushed smoking cessation to the bottom of the problem list and thus never get to discuss it again. A recent announcement from the FDA may give you a second chance to continue that conversation.

By now most adult cigarette smokers, and their doctors, have heard about ZYN. On June 30, the FDA granted Modified Risk Tobacco Product (MRTP) authorization for several ZYN …

Trauma-informed care starts before the first question

Melanie Allsop

Conditions and Diseases

July 28, 2026

Every first appointment with a new clinician, every first review after being admitted to a psychiatric ward, I spent less time thinking about what I wanted to say and more time wondering how I was going to answer the question I knew was coming. The question that always left me silent. The question that left me feeling as if I had already failed the conversation before it had even begun. …

Why problems with advance directives keep harming patients

Ferdinando Mirarchi, DO & Thaddeus Mason Pope, JD, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

July 28, 2026

This is why we get it wrong

As clinicians, we were taught that advance directives (ADs) and Portable Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLSTs) protect patient autonomy. So, we encourage our patients to complete them. Hospitals and health systems promote and measure our efforts. Public and private insurers pay for it. And policymakers celebrate them.

But these familiar tools upon which we so heavily rely at the end of life have been creating …

The slow collapse of developmental-behavioral pediatrics

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Conditions and Diseases

July 28, 2026

Developmental-behavioral pediatrics did not collapse overnight. It eroded the way institutions usually do: slowly, quietly, and then all at once. For those of us who practiced during its rise and decline, the story is not merely professional history. It is a record of what happens when a field built on dignity, patience, and longitudinal care is left without structural support.

For decades, developmental-behavioral pediatrics (DBP) served as a stabilizing force for …

Type 1 diabetes family history is still misunderstood

Shara Bialo, MD

Conditions and Diseases

July 28, 2026

As a pediatric endocrinologist, I often meet families on one of the hardest days of their lives: a T1D diagnosis. I watch as the shock sets in. I hear their worries, their concern for the future, and the questions that arise when I mention that family history can increase the risk of developing the disease by up to 15-fold. “What does this mean for our family? Could this happen to …

Impression management nearly burned me out

Beatrice Preti, MD

Conditions and Diseases

July 28, 2026

When I started my first full-time faculty position, one of my biggest worries was how I would manage working with the interdisciplinary team. I’d spent the last few months working as a locum at my most recent site of training, where I’d had years to develop rapport with consultants, nurses, allied health, and other staff. While that experience left me feeling confident in my abilities on the clinical side of …

The perimenopause annual visit OB/GYNs keep missing

Roxanne Pero, MD

Conditions and Diseases

July 27, 2026

The occasional “Doc, can you look in my ear?” or “Doc, my throat’s been scratchy, can you check it?” used to catch me off guard. I’d oblige, but with a disclaimer: “Well, I’m just a vagina doctor, but you’re here and, for some reason, I have an otoscope in my office, so let’s take a look.”

It never quite made sense to me. Why ask your OB/GYN to sort out an …

Why doctors should start long-term care planning

Cory Fosco

Conditions and Diseases

July 27, 2026

More than thirty-four years in long-term care, first as a social worker and admissions director in skilled nursing, later on the technology side, I have sat with countless families at the moment they needed help most. A parent who could no longer manage at home. A spouse whose memory had begun to slip. An adult child trying to make sense of a hospital discharge plan they did not see coming.

By …

Celebrating resilience can conceal a private crisis

Tiffiny Black, DM, MBA, MPA

Conditions and Diseases

July 27, 2026

Yesterday, I read an article that stopped me. Rachel Wells, a writer and technology entrepreneur, publicly shared that her family is facing the loss of their home. She described continuing to write, build, pitch, and speak about artificial intelligence (AI) and the future of work while privately confronting a far more immediate question: Where will my family live?

Her story stayed with me because it exposes something larger than one family’s …

Cardiac patients get a debrief. New mothers don’t.

Casey Keen

Conditions and Diseases

July 27, 2026

After almost any major medical event, someone walks you through what happened. A surgeon explains the procedure, a cardiologist reviews test results, and even a routine outpatient visit ends with some version of: here’s what we found, here’s what it means, here’s what’s next.

After birth, that conversation often doesn’t happen at all.

I had a birth that didn’t go the way anyone planned. There were interventions I didn’t fully understand in …

Reduced to a diagnosis: I was the patient in bed 27

Melanie Allsop

Conditions and Diseases

July 26, 2026

The longer I spent in the mental health system, the harder it became to remember who I was outside the pages of my medical record. Because when people stopped referring to me as the young girl I was, and instead as a diagnosis or simply as “the patient in bed 27,” how was I supposed to remember who I was outside those hospital walls? The staff had read through my …

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