Conditions

Overcoming dental anxiety for better oral health care

Conditions

March 15, 2026

Dental anxiety remains one of the most common yet overlooked barriers to oral health care. Despite advances in modern dentistry (painless techniques, improved anesthetics, and patient-centered care), millions of people continue to delay or completely avoid dental visits because of fear. The consequences extend far beyond oral health; untreated dental disease can significantly affect overall health, confidence, and quality of life. For many patients, dental anxiety begins early in life. …

Tubal ligation and widowhood: Navigating toxic requests

Dr. Vartika Mishra

Conditions

March 15, 2026

“Oh, poor thing!” exclaimed Dr. S, shaking her head in empathy.

“It is very sad,” I chimed in.

Lalita lay on the operating table. A sterile green cloth hung perpendicularly, separating her, the patient, from Dr. S and me, the operating surgeons.

She was undergoing her first cesarean section in view of fetal distress.

It was indeed very sad. Not the cesarean part, but the fact that her husband had passed away when she …

Lowercase PTSD: Why emergency staff are still hypervigilant

Amy Dinaburg, RN

Conditions

March 14, 2026

In the emergency department, you learn to function under pressure. You compartmentalize. You prioritize. You override your own nervous system in order to keep someone else alive.

During COVID, that skill became oxygen.

We worked in zones of four to eight critical patients, all unstable, all needing constant vigilance, or we were assigned to the lobby and hallways, managing 50 or 60 patients triaged as “non-critical,” knowing any one of them could …

Improving tobacco treatment in clinical practice

Edward Anselm, MD

Conditions

March 14, 2026

Modern medicine can transplant organs, cure hepatitis C, and deploy artificial intelligence to read radiology scans. Yet one of the most effective life-saving interventions in clinical medicine, treatment for tobacco dependence, is still delivered inconsistently. More than 28 million Americans continue to smoke cigarettes. Evidence-based treatments are widely available, inexpensive, and highly cost-effective. But across health systems, physicians rarely deliver them in a systematic way. By every measure, physicians are …

The mouth as a gateway: Why oral health matters for physicians

David Wadler, DDS and Neil Baum, MD

Conditions

March 14, 2026

One of us (NB) has been reasonably conscientious about his health for the past 50 years. He sees his PCP twice a year and has tried to set an example for his patients by focusing on diet and exercise. I have done well, except I need a little work on stress reduction and sleep hygiene. Curiously, in 50 years and more than 100 office visits to health care providers, no …

EGFR vs. ALK: How molecular profiling defines lung cancer treatment

Dr. Sunny Garg

Conditions

March 14, 2026

In today’s clinical oncology practice, the saying “no two cancers are alike” is more relevant than ever. I recently treated two patients with very similar advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were both critically ill. However, molecular profiling revealed distinct genetic drivers for each case, leading to very different, highly customized treatment plans.

Patient presentation and initial assessment

Both patients, in their late 60s and never-smokers, presented with weight loss, worsening …

The health care credentialing gap: Why top-down hiring fails

Jasmin Chui

Conditions

March 13, 2026

For many years the health care industry has operated under the “prestige” hiring model. We have been led to believe that to solve the crisis of patient safety and quality, we basically need more of the “top-tier” talent and specialists for MDs, more PhD-level nurses, and highly credentialed execs.

But we are now in the first quarter of 2026 and the data tells a different story. In spite of record spending …

How a broken hospital-to-home transition harms older adults

Gerald Kuo

Conditions

March 13, 2026

Families worry about stock market crashes. Retirees check their portfolios, track dividends, and follow market headlines. But in aging societies, the event that truly destroys a household’s stability rarely happens on Wall Street. It happens in the bathroom. An older adult falls.

I have seen this sequence unfold many times. The patient survives the hospital stay. The fracture is treated, medications are adjusted, and discharge instructions are printed. Clinicians feel relieved …

Navigating postoperative complications and post-surgical depression

Francisco M. Torres, MD

Conditions

March 13, 2026

Six months ago, I encountered a challenge I never expected: a robotic-assisted radical prostatectomy. Even now, writing about it feels surreal. Cancer rearranges life without warning, and surgery, regardless of how “minimally invasive” brochures describe it, alters you in ways only understood through experience.

The post-op instructions said that, within hours of surgery, I needed to stay active. That sounded simple enough beforehand. But no one asked about my fitness …

Understanding the types of PTSD and how to treat them

Faust Ruggiero

Conditions

March 13, 2026

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that can develop after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event, characterized by intrusive memories (flashbacks, nightmares), avoidance of reminders, negative mood changes (fear, anger, detachment), and heightened arousal (easily startled, irritability). The diagnosis of PTSD requires symptoms lasting over a month causing significant distress or impairment, and not due to substances or other conditions.

The five types of post-traumatic stress disorder

There are …

The evolutionary intelligence of human milk: HMOs and lactose

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

Conditions

March 12, 2026

Human milk contains more than nutrients; it carries a quiet, evolutionary intelligence expressed through chemistry. It is not conscious thought, but the slow wisdom of evolution written into molecules that nourish, protect, and guide.

Among its most remarkable ingredients are the human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). These complex sugars, present at around 0.5 to 1.5 g/dL, are not there to feed the infant directly.

They move through the stomach and small intestine largely …

Grief and healing: Learning to live with absence

Michele Luckenbaugh

Conditions

March 12, 2026

Life begins, and life ends.
We know this
the way we know the sun will rise,
as a fact, not a feeling.

Those we cherish
and those who cherished us
leave without rehearsal,
no warning bell
to soften the blow.
As if the heart
could ever be trained for absence.

They were threaded into the ordinary,
morning light, evening quiet,
the familiar rhythm of breath and belonging.

We assumed their nearness was permanent,
the way we assume tomorrow.

There were shared breaths of laughter,
tears that needed …

I lost 218 pounds and my ability to walk: a bariatric surgery regret

Stephanie Mojica

Conditions

March 12, 2026

I worry about whether I can access a building much more at my current weight of 160 pounds than I did when I weighed 378 pounds.

My adult weight, until recently, averaged 300 pounds. But in early 2022 I weighed 350, and in 2013 I weighed 378.

At those weights, I worried about distances, the number of stairs, the width of doorways, and the strength of the furniture. Today, I still worry …

When a code blue happens on a psychiatry unit

Devina Maya Wadhwa, MD

Conditions

March 11, 2026

The overhead call still feels wrong when it happens on a psychiatry unit. Code blue. The words echo through hallways designed for containment and calm, not cardiac arrest. Psychiatry is supposed to be about listening, de-escalation, and meaning-making. A code blue interrupts that narrative abruptly, reminding everyone in earshot that bodies, not diagnoses, ultimately set the terms. What struck me most was not the urgency of the response (clinicians are …

Why quality of life in health care is often overlooked

Jeffrey Junig, MD, PhD

Conditions

March 11, 2026

I switched beta blockers a few days ago. Four or five, maybe. Nothing dramatic. No crisis. No near-miss. But my fingers are warm again, for the first time in months. And I’m sleeping better than I have in a long time. Those aren’t headline outcomes. They’re not the things medicine congratulates itself for. They are just noticeable. Modern medicine is very good at preventing death. It’s less good at noticing …

Menopause and the drop in cervical cancer screening

Nenrot S. Gopep, MD, MPH

Conditions

March 10, 2026

Cervical cancer is one of the few cancers we actually know how to prevent. With HPV vaccination, routine screening, and early treatment of precancerous lesions, the disease is largely avoidable. Yet every year, thousands of women still develop cervical cancer, including about 14,000 women in the U.S. alone. When people think about cervical cancer prevention, the focus is usually on younger women: HPV vaccination for adolescents and Pap smears during …

Pharmaceutical advertising ethics: Why TV drug ads mislead patients

M. Bennet Broner, PhD

Conditions

March 10, 2026

Previously, I wrote about the patient’s responsibility to gain knowledge about their condition and treatments, and how this is not always easy to do. This is increasingly important, however, as clinicians have decreased time with patients for reasons often beyond their control.

This need for knowledge applies not only to medical visits, but also to advertisements for nostrums (e.g., Neuriva) and for legitimate drugs. Both create enticing visions on TV and …

Why implementation is not the same as readiness in health care

Tiffiny Black, DM, MPA, MBA

Conditions

March 10, 2026

Health care leaders often declare change a success long before the people inside the system feel steady again.

New technologies go live. Policies are implemented. Metrics stabilize. From an operational standpoint, the work appears complete. Yet beneath the surface, distress lingers, silence deepens, and trust erodes.

This paradox is becoming increasingly familiar to clinicians: Change is labeled “successful,” but the human experience tells a different story.

The problem is not resistance.
It is not …

Why medicine ignores its Cassandras: a case study in health disparities

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Conditions

March 9, 2026

Cassandra saw the future. No one believed her. Medicine has its Cassandras too, clinicians who name the failures before anyone else. Their warnings are dismissed, their foresight ignored, until the damage is undeniable.

This essay is built on an AI comparison. It set my 1998 Nisonger grant beside my 2025 testimony. The themes are identical: health disparities, economic justice, ethics, listening to families. I named them then. I name them now. …

The sensing gap: Why medical AI misses critical diagnoses

John C. Ferguson, MD

Conditions

March 9, 2026

The patient walked into the ER obtunded, breathing deep and fast, blood sugar over 400. Classic diabetic ketoacidosis. She had been symptomatic for three days.

Three days earlier, she had asked ChatGPT about her symptoms: excessive thirst, frequent urination, fatigue. The AI told her it was “probably related to dehydration and stress” and recommended increasing fluid intake and rest. It suggested calling her doctor “if symptoms don’t improve in a few …

Conditions

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts

Subscribe to KevinMD and never miss a story!

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts