Physician

Are medical malpractice lawsuits cherry-picked data?

Physician

January 7, 2026

Most recognize me for extolling the virtues of deductive reasoning in medical malpractice case review, but I never explain why I am so worked up over medical malpractice. Some would point out, “There are only 17,000 malpractice lawsuits filed per year out of a total of perhaps as many as 40 million lawsuits filed nationwide. Therefore, medical malpractice represents 0.04 percent of all lawsuits filed. What’s the big deal?” …

The Chief Poisoner: a chemotherapy poem

Ron Louie, MD

Physician

January 7, 2026

An excerpt from What the Physician Whispered.

You are looking at me, little one,
perhaps wondering who I might be.
Even though I might seem friendly,
you seem wary and frightened, not yet
used to seeing strangers and busy places.
Someone thought maybe I might help save you.

I offer to give you poison.

They have not told you, because they do not know
how sick you really are, meaning how close you are
to an unexpected conclusion that …

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The Chief Poisoner: a chemotherapy poem

Whole-body MRI screening: political privilege or future of care?

Michael Brant-Zawadzki, MD

Physician

January 6, 2026

The use of MRI body scanning as a preventative tool was highlighted by the president’s recent rope-a-dope with the media. Community practice whole-body MRI businesses now exist, local entrepreneurs directly marketing these services to the public. These scans are not reimbursable by traditional health payers.

The attraction of MRI is its lack of ionizing radiation, as well as its proven sensitivity to a variety of pathologies. Example: Detection of breast cancer …

Why doctors must stop waiting and reclaim their lives

Jessie Mahoney, MD

Physician

January 6, 2026

In medicine, waiting is normalized. We’re trained in it. Praised for it. We learn to delay sleep, meals, vacations, and emotions. We delay joy. Rest. Fulfillment. Relationships. Children.

From the very beginning, we’re taught that waiting is a virtue. That endurance is professionalism. That sacrificing our own needs is a sign of how much we care.

During training, we wait (for sleep, for food, for recognition). We wait for the pager to …

The hidden link between circadian rhythm and physician burnout

Shiv K. Goel, MD

Physician

January 6, 2026

By 11 p.m., my clinic was dark but my brain wasn’t. I found myself scrolling through my schedule for the next day: 22 patient visits, a pile of unsigned notes, two meetings squeezed into “lunch,” and a post-call morning that somehow still started at 7 a.m. None of these tasks were unusual, but what struck me was the growing tightness in my chest and the realization that I had quietly …

Why addiction is no longer just a clinical category

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

January 6, 2026

Addiction is no longer a clinical category. It has become the cultural baseline.

We used to think of addiction as something that happened to a few vulnerable people who “couldn’t handle” life’s pressures. Now it’s woven into everyday existence. Most of us reach for our phones before we reach for a breath. We chase stimulation without noticing we’re chasing. We live in a world that subtly trains us to crave.

Somewhere along …

Physician on-call compensation: the unpaid labor driving burnout

Corinne Sundar Rao, MD

Physician

January 6, 2026

As an internal medicine physician, I’ve spent years watching one quiet assumption extract more unpaid labor from physicians than anything else in our system. It’s not charting. It’s not meetings. It’s not metrics.

It’s call.

I wrote a post on my LinkedIn page about my thoughts regarding call. It resonated with many physicians, and I received many messages. It became clear that being “on call” is something that is rarely spoken about …

The real cost of U.S. health care dissatisfaction

Way Chiang, BSN, DO

Physician

January 6, 2026

There is a general undercurrent of dissatisfaction with health care in America that is, shall we say, palpable. Many studies and statistical analyses support this notion but I think a broader view is both valuable and less abstract than a data set. We could go measure the angle of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and evaluate the foundational errors, but it doesn’t take that level of granularity to see that …

EMR cognitive burden: the hidden cost of documentation

Matthew Ryan, MD, PhD

Physician

January 5, 2026

In basketball, when a player is called for a questionable foul, he may shrug and say: “Ball don’t lie.”

It means the game has a truth of its own. Reality asserts itself. Emergency medicine, unfortunately, rarely works that way.

We once spent most of our time with patients. Now a substantial portion of every shift is spent interacting with a screen, not because we prefer it, but because the system has evolved …

The Dr. Google debate: Building a doctor-patient partnership

Santina Wheat, MD, MPH

Physician

January 4, 2026

If you’ve been practicing medicine for any length of time, you’ve likely felt that familiar moment of overwhelm when a patient walks in with a stack of printouts, a list of 30 questions, or a frustrated statement like, “Well, I did my research.” And if we’re honest, many of us feel our chest tighten just a little. We feel the time pressure. We feel the responsibility. And sometimes, we feel …

Physician coaching: a path to sustainable medicine

Ben Reinking, MD

Physician

January 4, 2026

Perhaps you are standing in the same place I once stood: From the outside, everything looks great, but on the inside, you’re running on fumes.

In my mid-40s, I was on the verge of becoming a full professor. Our dream house was under construction. My retirement plan was on track so I could stop working before 60. Our kids were grown and thriving, launching their own lives. On paper, life was …

Physician investment in patients: ethical risks and rewards

Francisco M. Torres, MD

Physician

January 3, 2026

At its best, the doctor-patient relationship is an intimate one. Often, our patients appear before us in the most vulnerable moments of their lives. We treat their diseases, but we also tend to their emotional and spiritual well-being. That kind of intimacy can be meaningful and rewarding, but it can also breed awkward and even potentially compromising interactions. That is particularly true when money gets involved.

Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the …

How physician coaching helps restore energy reserves

Diane W. Shannon, MD, MPH

Physician

January 3, 2026

I’ve recently been intrigued by this question: Are you giving from extra or essence?

In many respects, giving from one’s essence is what burnout is all about. Your energy reserves (emotional, physical, mental, cognitive) are heading rapidly toward empty. Because of a mismatch between the energy drain from internal and external stressors and the ability to replenish your energy, you are left depleted.

I see this mismatch daily in the physicians whom …

Why physician wellness programs must evolve beyond institutions

Jessie Mahoney, MD

Physician

January 3, 2026

Wellness programming must evolve beyond institutions if we are serious about supporting physicians, especially women physicians.

For wellness to be taken seriously, it had to begin within institutions. Those efforts offered visibility and legitimacy. But institutional wellness is not the whole answer.

For 17 years, I led wellness initiatives inside a large medical organization. I saw the value of bringing attention to physician well-being. I also saw the limitations. Six years ago, …

Public health and primary care integration

Tyler B. Evans, MD, MPH

Physician

January 3, 2026

An excerpt from Pandemics, Poverty, and Politics: Decoding the Social and Political Drivers of Pandemics from Plague to COVID-19.

We talk about health as if it were an individual act of will, a matter of personal choice or risk tolerance. But anyone who has walked alongside people living in poverty, in refugee settlements, in overcrowded housing, or on the street knows that illness does …

The physical exam in the AI era

Jason Ryan, MD

Physician

January 2, 2026

For decades, many have documented the decline of the physical exam. As imaging grew more powerful, labs more precise, and algorithms more accurate, the stethoscope and reflex hammer faded in importance. Some even speculated that technology would eventually make hands-on diagnostic skills obsolete.

But the next era of medicine may flip that prediction on its head.

Picture a future where artificial intelligence participates in nearly all patient management decisions. This seems inevitable …

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The physical exam in the AI era

Physician attrition rates rise: the hidden crisis in health care

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Physician

January 2, 2026

America’s physician shortage is no longer a distant projection. It is happening now, steadily, one resignation, early retirement, and practice closure at a time.

A nationwide, longitudinal analysis published in Annals of Internal Medicine tracked more than 712,000 physicians caring for Medicare patients over a decade and found a troubling trend: Physician attrition from clinical practice rose from 3.5 percent in 2013 to 4.9 percent in 2019, across every specialty, …

How frivolous lawsuits drive up health care costs

Howard Smith, MD

Physician

January 2, 2026

Frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits are endemic and infect everyone whether they realize it or not. The greed of plaintiffs, attorneys, medical experts, and malpractice carriers, coupled with the ineptitude of the tort system, causes avoidable costs. Everyone pays the price.

Some plaintiffs sue for medical malpractice just because they harbor a grievance against a doctor and their claim has no attributable merit. Plaintiff attorneys, who are looking for business, advertise …

The shifting meaning of supervision in modern health care

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Physician

January 2, 2026

The discomfort I felt around supervising did not arise in the clinic. It arose while reading the agreements meant to define it.

Supervisory agreements. Collaborative designations. Regulatory language that needed to be reconciled (carefully, deliberately) because names, roles, and obligations matter. Like many physicians, I have signed these documents countless times. But reading them slowly, rather than reflexively, produced an unexpected unease, one that felt structural rather than personal.

The language was …

Personalized scientific communication: the patient experience

Dr. Vivek Podder

Physician

January 1, 2026

For decades, medicine has spoken the language of hazard ratios, Kaplan-Meier curves, and median survival differences. We have become fluent in the grammar of precision oncology, genomic signatures, driver mutations, targeted therapeutics, and real-time disease monitoring. But there is one language we have not yet mastered: the language of the patient’s lived experience.

Personalized medicine cannot stop at matching the right drug to the right tumor. It must also include personalized …