Physician

Physicians writing on KevinMD about the life of the profession: the work itself, the exhaustion, what women physicians are paid and asked to carry, the losses the profession has been slow to name, and who decides how physicians work. Five maintained records draw on this archive: Physician burnout: what physicians say, in their own words, Primary care: what physicians say, in their own words, Women in medicine: what women physicians say, in their own words,, Physician suicide: what physicians say, in their own words, and Physicians and administrators: what physicians say about who runs medicine, in their own words.

How physician burnout reaches into marriage

Ronke Dosunmu, MD

Physician

June 22, 2026

Physician burnout is often discussed as if it begins and ends at work. Workload, documentation burden, moral injury, loss of autonomy: These contributors are real. But they don’t exist in isolation.

Physicians don’t shed cognitive load at the end of a shift. The vigilance, decision-making, and emotional regulation required in clinical practice often continue at home, especially inside marriage and family life. Yet relational health is rarely considered a physician well-being …

Anchoring bias killed my father inside a stroke center

Lori Nelson, MD

Physician

June 22, 2026

“Eighty-six-year-old man dies of a stroke.”

It is the kind of sentence medicine writes cleanly, almost mercifully, as though a life can be folded into a diagnosis and quietly filed away. I have read sentences like that in charts, discharge summaries, death certificates. But this time, the man was my father.

His name was Herbert Nelson. Herb. Herbie. Brother Nelson. Elder Nelson. Mr. Nelson. Daddy.

He did not die alone in some forgotten …

Dignity in medicine starts with how we are seen

Ravi S. Aysola, MD

Physician

June 22, 2026

Years ago, I read about the sapeurs of Congo, men living with limited means who spent extraordinary care, money, and intention on clothing, color, elegance, and style. At first glance, it can seem irrational. It is not.

Dress, for them, is not vanity. It is dignity. It is self-definition. It is a refusal to let circumstance have the final word on identity. I have been thinking about that today.

Today is Juneteenth.

Today, …

A hard week is not a verdict on a physician’s career

Sofia Dobrin, MD

Physician

June 22, 2026

It was a hard week.

A colleague was suddenly gone, thirteen years of patients, of history, of complicated cases, and just like that, the rest of us were absorbing it. The calls. The messages. The patients showing up at my clinic needing someone. My own patients waiting longer. Notes to review that weren’t mine. Work landing on my desk that nobody planned for and nobody asked me about.

I kept my charts …

Who are you when the white coat is off?

Seleipiri Akobo, MD, MPH, MBA

Physician

June 22, 2026

Dear colleague,

I know exactly who you are. You are the one who has not missed a deadline since the third grade. You are the one who treats “triple board-certified” like a minimum requirement and “regional medical director” like a starting line. You are the one who has spent twenty years mastering the architecture of everyone else’s survival, while your own foundation is quietly crumbling.

But I have a question for you, …

Read more…

Who are you when the white coat is off?

Why frontline health care workers get no mental support

Jeremy Heffner, MD

Physician

June 20, 2026

The morning started the way too many did, with the phone ringing through the shower. I wiped the soap from my face and ran, already knowing what waited for me. A bloody, screaming child.

That is the job. Trauma and critical care surgery on the front line, for twenty years.

I co-founded the largest social platform for surgeons because we needed somewhere to tell the truth about this work. Today, I share …

Why resident mistreatment puts patient care at risk

Anonymous

Physician

June 19, 2026

After 20 years in medical practice, I made the decision to return to training for six months as a neonatology fellow to regain my neonatology board eligibility. At 54 years old, I did not come in with illusions. I expected long hours, academic rigor, and the challenge of re-entering a structured training environment after decades of independence.

What I did not expect was to witness, so clearly and so persistently, a …

Wealth inequality is a clinical problem, not political

Sameen Farooq, MD

Physician

June 19, 2026

We live and work in a sick society. I know this isn’t a revelation as much as a cruel reality. The disparity between those with means and those without is noticeable in every available metric dissecting the spending habits of Americans, credit card indebtedness, retail, stock market portfolios. In this sick system, I am so tired of hearing about the ultra-rich whine and complain about the “difficulties of being …

Professional identity in medicine has been hollowed out

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

June 19, 2026

The recent argument that physicians should abandon insurance-based care because the economics no longer work is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The strategist’s view focuses on reimbursement, overhead, and the arithmetic of survival. Those pressures are real. But the deeper crisis in American medicine is not financial. It is cultural.

Insurance-based care didn’t collapse because the math stopped working. It collapsed because the professional culture that once held the system …

Why is women’s mental health in psychiatry so overlooked?

Jincy Rajan, MD

Physician

June 19, 2026

“Women make up half the population, yet we still do not treat women’s mental health as a priority.”

Today, women’s mental health is a balance between what we know, what we ignore, and what we treat as optional. It exists in a landscape where society continues to find increasingly sophisticated ways to misunderstand it. When women speak, the world often responds with a polite, “Hmm, are you sure?”

I came to psychiatry …

Why I say no during a cosmetic surgery consultation

Richard V. Balikian, MD

Physician

June 18, 2026

One of the questions I get asked most often outside of the operating room has nothing to do with facelift techniques or eyelid anatomy.

It usually happens at dinner parties. Someone eventually finds out I’m a facial plastic surgeon, and after a few minutes the question comes: “Do you ever say no to patients?”

I always laugh because the answer is immediate. Absolutely. All the time. It’s my favorite thing to say. …

The generalist physician hiding in every specialist

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

June 18, 2026

The definition of a “doctor” is shifting in a way that feels increasingly fragmented. Growing up with a father who practiced for decades as a primary care physician before pursuing a residency in pediatrics, my baseline understanding of medicine was rooted in the “whole doctor” model. In that world, a physician addressed the majority of a patient’s needs and sought specialized intervention only when a situation truly demanded it. Today, …

Why pediatric direct primary care belongs at the door

Trey Williams, MD, MBA

Physician

June 18, 2026

It starts the same way every time.

A parent sends a text at 10:47 p.m. Their two-year-old has had a fever for three days. The urgent care closed at nine. The ER is 45 minutes away and will cost them $400 before anything is done. The on-call nurse line put them on hold. So they do what parents in 2026 do: They scroll, they worry, and they wait for morning.

I built …

How relationships affect health, seen from the exam room

Shiv K. Goel, MD

Physician

June 18, 2026

For the first decade of my medical career, I thought I was treating bodies. By the second decade, I noticed something else. I was usually treating relationships. Patients almost never told me directly.

A woman in her late forties came into my office last year. She had gained 22 pounds in a year, on a routine that had worked for the decade before it. Her labs were normal. Her thyroid was …

Knowing when to stop treatment is medicine’s quiet burden

Beatrice Preti, MD

Physician

June 18, 2026

It was my first ICU call shift as a second-year resident, and my first time holding the code pager, which rested, quiet but not quite forgotten, in my scrub top pocket until around 10 p.m.

The overhead speakers blared to life just as the pager began to beep. I ran to the cardiac ICU, forgetting my carefully organized ACLS cards on my call room desk. The patient was a middle-aged male …

Oncology grief is the price of caring deeply for patients

Rachel Jin, MD

Physician

June 17, 2026

Every day, I am invited into the most intimate and vulnerable chapters of another person’s life. Chapters no one ever plans for, marked by fear, grief, courage, and extraordinary love.

I have sat across from a 64-year-old man newly diagnosed with prostate cancer and watched tears fall from his eyes for the first time in over a decade. I have seen trembling hands of a young woman reach instinctively for her …

Physicians and natural disasters: the fifth season

American College of Physicians

Physician

June 17, 2026

As our calendars roll forward into the month of June, the summer season brings thoughts of family vacations, graduation ceremonies, and outdoor gatherings to many. But for me and others along the Gulf Coast, June 1 carries added meaning as …

Statistics are not destiny: a story of hope in oncology

Juan Carden, MD

Physician

June 17, 2026

I arrived at the office early that morning. The hospital still carried that mixture of stale coffee, disinfectant, and human exhaustion that exists only in medical corridors before eight in the morning. When I opened the door to the first examination room, I smiled peacefully. There sat Leon and Ilana. I had known them for so many years that it was impossible to remember when we had stopped addressing each …

Detachment is not strength: lessons from dying patients

Aditya Singh, MD

Physician

June 17, 2026

They say a dying man doesn’t lie. But have you ever wondered why?

Is it a sudden surge of enlightenment? A newfound wisdom that only arrives when the clock begins to run out? Or is it something more visceral? The experience of being brought face-to-face with every morally questionable choice, every “snoozed” priority, and every unspoken truth?

Many religions speak of a Judgment Day or a Karma, a moment where we are …

Guidelines are not evidence: the research to practice gap

Alissa Goodwin, MD

Physician

June 16, 2026

The patient would come in with a printout.

You know the one. Pulled from a website you’ve never heard of, about a mechanism you weren’t taught in medical school, asking about a test that isn’t in your standard workup. For a long time, my answer was some version of: I’m not familiar with that, the evidence isn’t there, let’s focus on what we know. Which was the honest answer. It was …

Physician

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