Conditions

Health insurance incentives and alternatives to opioids for chronic pain

Conditions

March 24, 2026

The opioid crisis rages on, and there is plenty of blame to go around: pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors, reckless prescribers, the FDA. One entity that has been overlooked is health insurance, whose incentives pushed chronic pain patients to take opioids in the first place.

Check out your insurance plan and the copays you pay for different services. In one of ours, a generic medication costs $10 a month, at most. Physical …

Communicating health to children: a pediatrician’s guide for parents

Joey Skelton, MD

Conditions

March 24, 2026

An excerpt from Your Child Is Not Their Weight: Parenting in a Size-Obsessed World, with permission from the American Academy of Pediatrics, 2026.

A friend and colleague who is a doctor in adult medicine made this comment to me several years ago: “My patients with kids have a harder time with their health than those who do not have kids!”

I pointed out to her that the “patients with kids” she …

The truth about short-term opioid prescribing and opioid use disorder

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions

March 23, 2026

In the thick of the opioid epidemic, there is this widespread fear called “opiophobia,” which basically means people, including patients and doctors, are scared to use opioids even when they are really needed for serious medical issues. This fear comes from the idea that even a short stint on opioids for acute pain, like after surgery, often leads to addiction or worse. John A. Bumpus’s 2025 review in ACS Pharmacology …

How spinal cord stimulation offers relief for chronic pain

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions

March 22, 2026

Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) continues to be a solid option for people dealing with chronic pain that just will not budge with the usual approaches like medications, physical therapy, or injections. It is a minimally invasive way to deliver low-level electrical pulses through electrodes placed in the epidural space near the spinal cord, helping to change how pain signals reach the brain and often providing relief in areas like the …

The rhythm of healthy aging: Moving beyond health care metrics

Gerald Kuo

Conditions

March 22, 2026

Families often ask me what “healthy aging” really means. They expect actionable answers: target lab values, a 30-minute exercise prescription, or a strict dietary plan. In modern health care, we deliver these metrics with precision, yet our patients continue to struggle. That gap is not a failure of compliance. It is a failure of imagination. Recently, I found myself contemplating a different kind of prescription while attending a piano recital …

Managing acute heart failure: evidence from the DOSE trial

Benjamin P. Geisler, MD, Jeffrey L. Greenwald, MD, and Kathy May Tran, MD

Conditions

March 22, 2026

An excerpt from 50 Studies Every Hospitalist Should Know.

Debbie Lin Teodorescu, MD, MEng, a cardiologist, and Hugo Torres, MD, MPH, an endocrinologist, authored this article.

The DOSE trial provided good insight into the dosage and frequency for administering loop diuretics in patients presenting with acute decompensated heart failure. Physicians can prescribe intravenous loop diuretics with confidence that their decision is evidence-based, efficacious, and safe.

Research questions

Among patients with hemodynamically …

Beyond standard protocols: How translational science helps difficult IVF cases

Lina Gabriela Villar Muñoz, MD

Conditions

March 20, 2026

I have stood in that exam room more times than I care to admit, my hand lingering on the door handle, searching for a way to tell a patient that she has no viable embryos to transfer because her egg quality is poor. “Poor egg quality” is not a diagnosis but an observation, and one that leaves us uncertain whether the problem is intrinsic to the patient or a response …

How the new DOT ruling on food allergies threatens air travel safety

Lianne Mandelbaum, PT

Conditions

March 20, 2026

On March 18, 2026, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a ruling that could make air travel less safe for millions of Americans with food allergies, by limiting a basic accommodation many rely on to prevent life-threatening exposure. Food allergies are a serious, life-threatening medical condition that remains widely misunderstood. For millions of travelers, navigating airline policies is an unpredictable challenge, where inconsistent accommodations and societal skepticism create unnecessary risk. …

The psychology of hero worship: When admiration overrides reason

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

Conditions

March 20, 2026

Emotional contagion and crowd psychology are powerful forces that shape human behavior in large gatherings. In India, where collective identity and reverence for public figures often run deep, emotional responses within crowds may take on added intensity. This reflection draws on an incident from Tamil Nadu to illustrate how collective emotion can sometimes override proportion and common sense, with implications for community safety and well-being.

This may sound amusing today, but …

How junk food shrinks your brain and fuels depression

Marc Arginteanu, MD

Conditions

March 20, 2026

Let us cut to the chase: Your daily dose of junk food is not just padding your waistline; it is quietly eroding the most complex organ in your body. The evidence is no longer scattered case reports or instinctive hunches. It is an ever-growing stack of human epidemiology, neuroimaging, and mechanistic biology. Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are associated with depression, a shriveling brain, systemic inflammation (which crosses the blood-brain barrier), gut …

The 3 levels of psychiatric treatment: biological, psychosocial, moral

Mark D. Kilgus, MD, PhD and Nicolas Badre, MD

Conditions

March 19, 2026

One can consider that psychiatric treatment occurs on three levels: biological, then psychosocial, and then moral-existential. First, if needed, the psychiatrist prescribes medication to rectify biological abnormalities. Second, the therapist facilitates psychotherapy to address psychosocial problems. Third, the therapist uses the clinician-patient …

Why clinician education must prioritize nutrition training

Beata Pasek, EdD

Conditions

March 19, 2026

When I began coordinating GI research in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), I noticed something unexpected: Second- and third-year GI fellows, bright, motivated, steeped in medical science, had received little to no formal training on diet’s role in disease. For many, nutrition was treated as peripheral, “something dietitians handle,” rather than core physician knowledge.

This is not a reflection on their ability or commitment. It reflects how medical education is structured. U.S. …

Surviving stage 4 breast cancer: a 10-year journey of hope

Tami Berczuk

Conditions

March 18, 2026

As I approach the 10-year anniversary of hearing the words “I am 99 percent sure you have breast cancer,” I have many emotions: gratitude, fear, anxiety, hope. Having been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer in 2016, then learning it had metastasized to my liver, so stage 4, I had so many questions and so much uncertainty.

Since then, it has been a journey of self-reflection, relationship evaluation, insurance negotiations, family …

The hidden cost of long-term care policy for family caregivers

Gerald Kuo

Conditions

March 18, 2026

Every spring, millions of families across Chinese communities around the world travel back to their hometowns for Qingming Festival, often translated as “Tomb-Sweeping Day.” It is a centuries-old tradition of honoring ancestors. Highways fill with traffic. Families gather at gravesites to clean tombstones, burn incense, and leave offerings of food. On the surface, Qingming is about remembering the dead. But in many homes, the holiday quietly exposes a different reality: …

ADHD in physicians: Why medical training punishes neurodiversity

Samantha Leite, MD

Conditions

March 18, 2026

I was halfway through my first year of OB-GYN residency when I learned that my brain had been working against me my entire life. By then, I had passed licensing exams, matched into a surgical specialty, and learned how to function convincingly while exhausted. What I had not learned, and what medicine never taught me, was how to recognize when “high functioning” was actually quiet suffering. And that distinction matters, …

The biological cost of night-shift work on circadian rhythms

Chinyelu E. Oraedu, MD

Conditions

March 17, 2026

“Try not to work the night shift if you can.” Many physicians have said this to patients. Some have said it to colleagues. Often, we say it because we understand the science: Working through the night comes at a physiologic cost. Night-shift work is associated with weight gain, chronic fatigue, disrupted sleep, insulin resistance, and increased long-term risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. Circadian disruption affects …

Why perfectionism in medicine leads to moral injury

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Conditions

March 16, 2026

In the hallowed halls of medical school, we are often screened for traits that make the “ideal doctor”: high empathy, meticulous perfectionism, and a profound sense of duty. We are the fixers, the ones who find deep meaning in the intersubjective space between healer and patient. Yet, there is a shadow side to this personality architecture that no one talks about, an underlying proclivity toward rejection sensitivity.

The very traits that …

Adult disability care transition: Why medicine must grow up

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Conditions

March 16, 2026

“Let’s Fly.” Captain Burnham’s words on the USS Discovery were more than a command. They were a declaration of trust, of forward motion, of refusing paralysis.

That is the question before us now: What happens when children with disabilities grow up?

For decades, pediatrics treated disability as a childhood condition. The grant language, the fellowship training, the systems of care, all built on the assumption that disability ends at eighteen. But children …

How the microvasculature drives the human aging process

Kenneth Ro, MD

Conditions

March 16, 2026

For years we have searched for the causes of aging inside the cell. Researchers study mitochondrial dysfunction, DNA damage, and the accumulation of senescent cells. But the real bottleneck in aging may not lie inside the cell at all. It may lie in the system that keeps those cells alive. During my years working in emergency medicine, I often saw patients whose blocked coronary arteries had been successfully opened during …

Herniated disc recovery: a physician’s personal journey

Eric Dessner, MD

Conditions

March 16, 2026

Anyone that has suffered a herniated disc knows that the road to recovery can feel like a spiritual journey. The searing pain can be so extreme that it leads us to prayer. We may even question the very design of the human body. Why would an all-powerful, wholly good Creator of the Universe endow man with the capacity to experience so much agony? To fear the electric jolt caused by …

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