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.

A clinical research portfolio is a set of strategic bets

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

Physician

August 10, 2026

Clinical research is typically managed one protocol at a time, with each study having its own budget, timeline, team, recruitment target, and publication plan. While this structure is essential, it can obscure a larger truth. Research organizations do not merely manage projects; they manage portfolios of strategic bets.

Every trial utilizes limited resources. Investigator time, research staff, patient access, data infrastructure, funding, laboratory capacity, and organizational attention cannot be allocated everywhere …

Physician time management is a relationship, not a skill

Maryna Mammoliti, MD

Physician

August 8, 2026

I am sitting at my desk today, a typical clinic “good day.” My EMR is open. I have several active messages from my secretary, several messages from patients, appointment requests, pending consult requests, medication refill requests, insurance requests, hospital emails, medical students, medical student schedule change, an email from a resident, several hospital emails, and a hospital schedule email, all needing my attention at the same time. And this is …

Explaining clinical reasoning to patients in five questions

Alan P. Feren, MD

Physician

August 8, 2026

Every summer, a new class of medical students puts on a short white coat for the first time and walks onto a hospital floor. Elsewhere, third-year students begin their first clinical clerkships, and new residents are several weeks into carrying responsibility that no longer ends when a lecture, examination, or scheduled exercise is over.

They will be taught multiple approaches to the art, science, and practice of medicine. They will learn …

Automation bias in medicine already has doctors deferring

Colin G. Knight, MD

Physician

August 8, 2026

At the hospital where I operate, most of the pediatric subspecialists never walk through the door. Endocrinology, hematology, infectious disease: The consult happens by phone. They read the chart, they ask questions, they leave a plan. I would like to tell you the plan is usually right. I have no way to know that. The hospitalist examined the child. The specialist did not, and there is no second version of …

How administrative bloat broke American medicine

Dan Rusu, MD

Physician

August 8, 2026

I trained at Cook County Hospital in Chicago thirty years ago. We did not have RVUs. We did not have prior authorization. We did not have a ratio of ten administrators for every physician. We had patients who came through a door where nobody asked for their insurance card, and we did our best for them. That was the system. It worked.

What replaced it is documented in public data that …

Most medical malpractice lawsuits are meritless

Howard Smith, MD

Physician

August 6, 2026

The story of medical malpractice litigation in the United States is the endless struggle to find meaning.

The United States is a litigious society. One out of every 230 Americans is a lawyer, and one out of every eight Americans will be involved in litigation in one way or another and will need a lawyer. There are 40 million lawsuits per year. Between 20,000 and 85,000 are medical malpractice claims. The …

The one-dimensional doctor is going extinct

Elizabeth Agyeman Prempeh, MD

Physician

August 6, 2026

I was recently watching the wedding and honeymoon vlog of one of my favorite content creators. Weddings are fascinating milestones. It is probably the only moment in your entire life where you get absolutely every person you love gathered together in one single room. You are the undisputed center of attention. All eyes are on you, and the atmosphere is pure, concentrated love.

But as I was watching those perfect moments …

The patient experience question physicians get wrong

Manoj Sreedharan, MD

Physician

August 6, 2026

There is a question I have heard countless times throughout my career.

“Was the patient happy?”

It is usually asked with good intentions, but I have often wondered whether we are asking the wrong question. As physicians, our responsibility has never been to make every patient happy. We cannot promise antibiotics for viral infections, unnecessary imaging for reassurance, or pain medications simply because they are expected. Good medicine often requires uncomfortable conversations …

Why evidence alone doesn’t change minds

Steve Sobel, MD

Physician

August 6, 2026

If solid evidence reveals that major, long-held beliefs rest on wobbly pillars of false assumptions, how can we convince others to jettison such beliefs and embrace novel approaches? What can we learn from the tragic case of Ignaz Semmelweis in this regard?

In 1847, one in six mothers perished from childbed (puerperal) fever at the Vienna General Hospital where Dr. Semmelweis worked. In some months up to 30 percent of mothers …

Read more…

Why evidence alone doesn’t change minds

Why using AI to write articles needs an audit trail

Bobby Dubois, MD, PhD

Physician

August 5, 2026

Not long ago, I wrote a Sensible Medicine article about AI called “I invented a headache to test AI and here is what I found.” I concluded that for diagnosing my headache (and a few other conditions), AI got things wrong quite often. When given full history of my problem, it did well, but a typical patient doesn’t know the pertinent negatives and positives to provide the GPT. False-positive …

Medical misinformation arrives before the physician does

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Physician

August 5, 2026

An excerpt from Medicine Versus Politics: Three Tales of Patient Survival.

Deception has always been a weapon, but in our time it has become a system. In medicine especially, where facts should be the most trusted currency, lies can wound as surely as disease itself. Repetition, amplification, and manipulation turn rumor into “truth” at a frightening pace. When politics co-opts this process, the consequences are not merely theoretical; they can …

Tobacco harm reduction changes the talk with your doctor

Edward Anselm, MD

Physician

August 5, 2026

Until recently people who smoke cigarettes were presented with a simple choice: continue smoking and worsen the risk and severity of tobacco-related disease or make another quit attempt. The doctor would ask, “Do you believe that you are ready to quit smoking?” Both doctor and patient would be relieved when the answer was “no.” The doctor was given back some valuable time …

How specialists can handle difficult patients

Joan Naidorf, DO

Physician

August 5, 2026

I recently had the opportunity to speak with a group of neurogastroenterologists who practice at a major referral center. These specialty physicians treat people with complex digestive disorders such as gastroparesis, abnormal motility, and irritable bowel disease. They also treat patients with illnesses categorized as “functional gastrointestinal disorders,” where no specific physical or lab abnormality can be identified. The people who have these disorders can get very frustrated and unhappy …

Gratitude in medicine: the people who carried me

Timir Banerjee, MD

Physician

August 5, 2026

Reason

I find that this exercise of thanking and expressing gratitude makes my journey to the land of the unknown joyful. I thought I should do this when I have a clear mind and good health. I am teaching the residents now to understand its value. I am writing this now so that I am not too late to thank all those who helped transform my life. I want to show …

Tele-critical care today is not what the studies actually tested

Keith Corl, MD

Physician

August 4, 2026

In an early 2026 piece, I criticized the growing practice of outsourcing bedside ICU care to tele-critical care programs. I argued that replacing the in-person work of physicians, nurse practitioners (NPs), and physician assistants (PAs) with remote physicians leads to the lack of a bedside leader, shoddy exams, breaks in the continuity of care, the depersonalization of the doctor-patient relationship, and an overall degradation in the quality of ICU …

Shifting health care toward prevention, not just treatment

Narinder Singh Parhar, MD

Physician

August 4, 2026

Health care has never possessed more scientific knowledge, more sophisticated technology, or more specialized expertise than it does today. Yet despite these remarkable advances, chronic disease continues to rise, health care costs continue to escalate, physician burnout persists, and patients increasingly spend more years living with illness rather than enjoying health.

This paradox raises an important question. A probable explanation: Perhaps our greatest challenge is not a lack of scientific progress. …

How clinicians find recovery from gaslighting

Donald J. Murphy, MD

Physician

August 4, 2026

I work with many victims of gaslighting around the country. We learn from each other. Those who have lost their licenses to work can follow these steps to regain their licenses and resume their careers.

First, acknowledge that any victim of gaslighting suffers some degree of PTSD. Severe gaslighting leads to complex PTSD. The federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) laws put in place before 2000 state that those suffering from …

What plain medical language gives families back

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

August 4, 2026

Medicine is built on language. Not just terminology, but a shared vocabulary that allows us to describe the body with precision, to communicate risk without panic, and to translate complexity into clarity for families. Yet in recent years, medical language has drifted toward two extremes: jargon inflation on one side, oversimplification on the other. Both leave patients, and young clinicians, unmoored.

I was reminded of this recently while helping my son …

Who your malpractice defense lawyer really works for

Howard Smith, MD

Physician

August 4, 2026

A miscreant is simply a troublemaker. When it comes to a medical malpractice lawsuit, the biggest miscreant is the defense attorney followed closely by the medical malpractice insurance company.

For a doctor, medical malpractice insurance coverage is the difference between financial security and ruin. I practice in the state of Maryland. Maryland law does not force physicians to buy medical malpractice insurance. Nevertheless, doctors must carry a policy, which has a …