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.

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

Gerald Kuo

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 and Diseases

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 and Diseases

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 and Diseases

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 and Diseases

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 and Diseases

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 and Diseases

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 and Diseases

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 and Diseases

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 and Diseases

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, MBA, MPA

Conditions and Diseases

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 and Diseases

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 and Diseases

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 …

Essential personnel safety: the hypocrisy of hospital snow policies

Debbie Moore-Black, RN

Conditions and Diseases

March 9, 2026

Oh, how I remember this well: The wicked snowstorm that paralyzed many cities, year after year. I was driving my van to work as it slid on black ice and directed me down a hill towards a large church. I had no control and could only pray that I didn’t hit that large telephone pole. When my van finally came to a stop, I realized I had missed the telephone …

Finding balance in political turmoil: a poem on resilience

Michele Luckenbaugh

Conditions and Diseases

March 8, 2026

The world has slipped out of rhythm,
like a clock knocked from the wall
that still insists on ticking,
though the hours no longer agree.

Nothing aligns with the way it lived
in my body a year ago.
Then, there was a sense of ballast.
Morning came without dread
clinging to its edges.
I could rise,
place my feet on the floor,
and believe, perhaps naively,
that the ground would hold.

I believed the voices we chose would,
at minimum, remember us.
That disagreement was …

Books that shape life values: a lifelong reading list

Richard A. Lawhern, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

March 7, 2026

As much as I have written about pain and addiction care over the past three decades, daily life for most of my readers is about even larger values. This current conversation is about values that may change and shape our lives.

I grew up in an age before computers, much less electronic books or Kindle or the internet. I am a dinosaur when it comes to remembering too many darned passwords …

Artificial intelligence and the future of fetal heart rate monitoring

Martin G. Frasch, MD, PhD, Mark I. Evans, MD, and Philip J. Steer, MD

Conditions and Diseases

March 7, 2026

For half a century, the “gold standard” of labor safety has been a single, flickering line on a screen. But as recent reporting confirms, that line is often a lie. Our obsession with isolated fetal heart rate patterns has created a surgical “false positive pipeline,” driving C-section rates to historic highs without actually reducing the incidence of cerebral palsy.

The myth of the “failed” test

The skepticism surrounding EFM often stems from …

The hidden dangers of AI voice assistants in elder care

Gerald Kuo

Conditions and Diseases

March 7, 2026

“Mom says she talks to me every day now.”

The son told me this during a clinic visit. His 82-year-old mother, once painfully lonely, now smiled again. She told everyone she spoke with her son every morning. He asked about her day. He reminded her to take her medication. He listened to her stories.

There was only one problem.

She was not talking to her son. She was talking to an AI voice …

The Platinum Rule in health care: Moving beyond the Golden Rule

Harvey Max Chochinov, MD, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

March 7, 2026

An excerpt from In Search of Dignity: A Lifetime of Reflections.

Several years before her death at the age of 55 years due to complications of cerebral palsy, my sister Ellen was again in hospital, this time in intensive care and on the brink of respiratory collapse. To say cerebral palsy had shaped her life is an understatement, in that it molded nearly every facet of her being, from the …

Silent heart attack symptoms: my missed diagnosis story

Brian Ferri

Conditions and Diseases

March 6, 2026

Most people expect a heart attack to announce itself with unmistakable force, crushing pain, shortness of breath, a dramatic collapse. Mine arrived quietly, unnoticed, and remained hidden for years. What I discovered in 2026 forced me to revisit events from 2018 and 2019 and confront how easily critical medical information can slip through the cracks when communication fails.

A routine appointment reveals a hidden past

On Jan. 8, 2026, during a routine …