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.

Bridging the gap in neurodevelopmental care and pediatrics

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

April 27, 2026

Long before I stood on collapsing bridges between DBP and NDD, I was the 1977 kid who intentionally derailed Bobby Jr.’s grand “seed money” scheme for free home heating oil for the poor, not out of mischief, but because there was no plan behind it. It was a hallucinogenic vision dressed up as strategy, with no capability for realization. Even then, I could not pretend something workable existed when it …

Overcoming barriers to holding babies with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy during therapeutic cooling

Newborn Brain Society and Hope for HIE

Conditions and Diseases

April 27, 2026

Imagine going to the hospital after nine months of pregnancy expecting to have a perfect birth and baby only to suffer from a tragic birth complication. Your doctor shares that your baby has a brain injury and must be transferred to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for cooling treatment. You meet your baby surrounded by machines and loud monitors. For three long days during this cooling treatment, you are …

A physician’s journey with a hidden CSF leak and delayed diagnosis

Anonymous

Conditions and Diseases

April 27, 2026

In 2023, I was in a serious motor vehicle collision. The injury that followed, a vertebral artery dissection, required real recovery. I did the work and thought I had come out the other side. I was looking forward to celebrating my three-year anniversary since the accident. I was feeling grateful. I was not expecting what came next.

The bike

I love spinning. The bike was the first thing I reclaimed after the …

Bariatric surgery vs. semaglutides vs. endoscopic visceral lipectomy

Robert Cucin, MD, JD

Conditions and Diseases

April 27, 2026

Despite the emergence of new pharmacologic alternatives to traditional bariatric surgery, the global obesity epidemic continues to escalate. Semaglutides, while effective for some, are costly, require weekly injections, and often cause side effects that lead many patients to discontinue treatment and subsequently regain much or all the weight they lost. Both bypass and restrictive bariatric procedures carry significant risks, side effects, and long-term lifestyle adjustments, and most patients ultimately reach …

The hidden costs of delayed diagnosis and diagnostic ambiguity

Bita Ghatan

Conditions and Diseases

April 26, 2026

One of the most damaging patterns in health care is also one of the most accepted: delayed diagnosis.

What stays with me is not only the diagnosis that came too late. It is everything that happened before it. The months. Sometimes the years. The symptoms that were minimized, misread, or explained away. The patient who was still struggling, but without enough clarity to move care forward. The family trying to function …

Why the doctor-patient relationship survives when trust in public health fails

Myles Deal, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 26, 2026

Once the lockdowns from COVID-19 began, a new normal of distrusting America’s public health officials started. Dr. Anthony Fauci quickly became the most famous and controversial physician in America. At the start of the pandemic, having the responsibility of communicating information and data with the entire country, his advice was trusted by most Americans; a Kaiser Family Foundation survey showed that in December 2020, 90 percent of Democrats and …

Why cooking for better health makes dietary changes easier

Oliver Power

Conditions and Diseases

April 26, 2026

Recently, my mother was told by her doctors that her high blood pressure was a concern and that she needed to make dietary changes and eat foods lower in sodium. Seemed simple. To my mother, what was clear was the need for significant dietary change to stay below 2,300 mg of sodium, the recommended limit by the American Heart Association. Sure, she would make sure to not eat food overpowered …

How blood-based brain biomarkers predict Alzheimer’s progression

Marc Arginteanu, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 25, 2026

As someone who has spent decades peering into skulls and pondering the fragile machinery inside, I have seen firsthand how our gray matter can falter under the weight of time, stress, and poor habits. But here is the exciting part: Science is handing us tools to fight back. In this post, we will dive into brain biomarkers, those clever little signals in your blood that reveal what is happening upstairs. …

Why local care matters for peripheral arterial disease

Devin Zarkowsky, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 25, 2026

When asked by the surgery department chair as a medical student why I wanted to treat vascular patients, my response was to be useful, useful to people with a challenging systemic disease that often results in stroke, amputation, and death. Often, wounds that have not healed for months on a foot or a hand, or persistent leg pain provoked by walking or simply laying in bed are subtle indicators that …

The hidden dangers of dental sedation and dental anesthesia in kids

Irim Salik, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 24, 2026

A healthy, 4-year-old girl was brought to the pediatric dental office for treatment of several cavities. The parents were told their child would be given medication to help her “sleep” through the procedure. Easier and quicker than going to a hospital, office-based dental sedation was presented as a safe, routine option for children.

After the sleeping medication was administered, the child grew quiet and became still. The dental work began. At …

What a tiny dog taught me about the nervous system

Carrie Friedman, NP

Conditions and Diseases

April 24, 2026

Bree is an 11 1/2 year-old, 4.2-pound micro mutt who once lived on the streets of Long Beach. She eventually wound up at Long Beach Animal Care Services, where she sat in a crowded cold cement kennel with no bed, no blanket, no toys, and one very sick basset hound with parvovirus. Every dog in that kennel was scheduled to be euthanized on Christmas Eve 2014. If it weren’t for …

Rethinking nutrition policy on ultra-processed food

Hana Kahleova, MD, PhD, MBA

Conditions and Diseases

April 24, 2026

For more than a decade, the phrase “ultra-processed food” has functioned as nutritional shorthand for danger, a dietary villain blamed for rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. The public message has been simple: If it is ultra-processed, avoid it. But science is rarely that simple.

My colleagues and I recently reviewed the growing body of research examining ultra-processed foods, not as a single monolithic category, but as distinct …

How to treat chronic pain and depression together

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 23, 2026

As a physician who has spent years managing patients with persistent pain, I often encounter the same frustrating cycle. A patient arrives with unrelenting back pain that has lasted for months. They describe not just physical discomfort but a deepening sense of hopelessness, fatigue, and withdrawal from life. Is the pain causing the depression, or did underlying depressive symptoms amplify an initially manageable ache into something chronic and debilitating? It …

Transforming sepsis care with rapid host response diagnostics

Jasjot S. Johar, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 23, 2026

In busy emergency departments, sepsis is often discussed as something we “cannot miss” rather than a diagnosis we can confidently make. Patients may arrive with signs of an infection and physiologic abnormalities, yet fall into the gray zone where sepsis is possible, but far from certain. Over the last decade our definition of sepsis has evolved to recognize that sepsis is more than an infection and …

How research laboratory culture shapes mentorship in academic life

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

April 23, 2026

Every research mentor eventually faces a difficult question: What, and who, will continue when the work is no longer theirs to carry forward?

We often speak about mentoring, yet the dilemma of mentorship is rarely addressed directly. Perhaps it lies at the intersection of responsibility and uncertainty. Mentorship is often imagined as guidance freely given, with apprenticeship unfolding naturally. In modern academic life, however, the laboratory is shaped not only by …

The continuum of fertility care: Why IVF is not the only option

Scott Morin

Conditions and Diseases

April 22, 2026

At a time when one in five married American couples experience infertility, and one in three American men have a low sperm count, concerns around fertility and conception have led millions to seek solutions. But family building is rarely a linear process, and for every individual or couple able to successfully conceive on the first try, there are just as many who may seem to be doing everything right without …

Why heart failure care requires spaced repetition for doctors

Vimal George, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 22, 2026

It is 4:50 p.m. on a Thursday. Your last patient is a 67-year-old with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. He has been hospitalized twice this year. His medications look familiar. A beta-blocker. An ACE inhibitor. A loop diuretic. But something is missing. You scroll through the chart. No mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist. No SGLT2 inhibitor. No ARNI. You pause. You know the guidelines. You have heard the talks. You …

Therapeutic alliance in psychiatry matters more than ever

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 22, 2026

Each May, during Mental Health Awareness Month, the health care industry releases its usual statements about access to care, workforce stress, and the enduring shadows of stigma. I usually read them between back-to-back appointments, staring at a screen full of diagnostic codes. The systemic issues are always important, yet, amidst the charts, the 20-minute med checks, and the rhetoric, there remains a more profound question I have to ask myself …

Why doctors struggle to listen to your body after an injury

Diane Alexander, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 22, 2026

For 26 years as a plastic surgeon, I have given my patients the same advice after surgery: Listen to your body. Pain, fatigue, and swelling are not inconveniences. They are signals. They are the body’s language, guiding us toward healing or warning us when we have gone too far. What I have learned this year, at 65, is how difficult that advice can be to follow.

In January, I was training …

IVF insurance coverage depends on your ZIP code

Laurel A. Coons, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

April 22, 2026

Two patients can have the same infertility diagnosis, need the same treatment, and see the same specialist. Yet one may move forward with insurance coverage while the other is left staring at a bill for tens of thousands of dollars. In the United States, that difference is often not medical. It is geography. As a biomedical scientist, I’ve seen how evidence should guide care. Yet for infertility, your ZIP code …

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