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A 20-item checklist for trainee research projects

Medical Education

May 19, 2026

While excellent guides exist for research topic discovery or planning, and finding suitable journals for publication, a short practical checklist to help trainees determine if a project proposal is a great fit is useful (see the checklist below). Here, I outline items to consider before you commit to a project and provide my take on two main categories of topics: 1) those where a single NO generally should lead to …

How anal health education helps detect anal cancer

Talar Tejirian, MD

Conditions and Diseases

May 19, 2026

10 years ago, I met a local news health reporter at my cousin’s house. By then, I had been a general surgery attending for almost a decade and was shocked by the lack of public health education about anal health care issues. I had also amassed a particularly busy proctology clinic over the years, seeing patient after patient who had suffered for extended periods, afraid to see a doctor and …

How Medicare changes affect medical billing contracts

GetPracticeHelp

Physician Finance

May 19, 2026

Policy changes eventually become operating decisions

Most coverage of Medicare payment changes stops at reimbursement. A practice reads that a rule changes payment for certain services, then asks the obvious question: How much revenue is at risk?

That question matters, but it is not the only operator question. Medicare practice expense and related Physician Fee Schedule changes also affect the billing-service decision. If the practice outsources billing, the policy change does not …

Compassionate health care transforms the patient journey

Kim Downey, PT & Randy McNeely

Conditions and Diseases

May 19, 2026

Randy McNeely: We are never more vulnerable than in the moments when life delivers news we did not expect, and are not prepared to hear. That moment came for my wife and me in early August 2023.

A few weeks earlier, Kimberly was helping our daughter move a small chest freezer when she felt a sharp twinge in her right thigh. It seemed like a pulled muscle, so she treated it …

14 patients studied, thousands injecting: the peptide evidence gap [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 18, 2026

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

Why do patients refuse statins backed by decades of data in millions of people yet eagerly inject peptides tested in fewer than 20? Emergency medicine physician and longevity practitioner Vikas Patel confronts this …

How data monetization acts as a new digital currency

Jarelis Cabrera

Health Technology

May 18, 2026

Crypto. Bitcoin. Gold. Every few years, a new wave of thinking challenges the traditional dominance of the dollar. People look for alternative stores of value, something more stable, more independent, or more future-facing. But while everyone is debating what the next currency might be, we are overlooking the one that is already here, quietly gaining power behind the scenes: data. As artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and digital infrastructure continue …

AI chatbots and patient safety need physician design

Tod Stillson, MD

Health Technology

May 18, 2026

My patients don’t wait for me anymore. That’s not a complaint. It’s a clinical reality I had to sit with before I could do anything useful about it.

Patients started arriving at appointments having already run their symptoms through an AI chatbot. Sometimes they’d decided not to come in at all. Sometimes they were right. Sometimes they weren’t. I’ve spent the last several years building an AI-assisted triage and treat virtual …

Reclaiming the lost art of the physical exam

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

May 18, 2026

Before the imaging, the lab work, or the referral, there is a moment when the body is already speaking.

The way someone walks into the room. The hesitation before sitting down. The guarded turn of a shoulder. The subtle shift away from one hip before pain is ever described.

Medicine once placed enormous value on these observations. Observation was not separate from diagnosis; it was the beginning of it.

Sherlock Holmes famously suggested …

Primary aldosteronism hides behind high blood pressure

Sanjay B. Dixit, MD

Conditions and Diseases

May 18, 2026

A little-known and misunderstood disease affecting as many as 12 million Americans, putting them at risk of potentially deadly complications, is often missed or misdiagnosed.

Primary aldosteronism (PA) is a serious condition that affects as many as 5 to 10 percent of adults with high blood pressure (BP). High BP is widely prevalent in the U.S., nearly half of all adults (almost 120 million individuals) have it. Yet, for many years, …

Cognitive overload in cardiac arrest is a human problem

Michael Peck, MD

Conditions and Diseases

May 18, 2026

Thirty years ago, I ran a cardiac arrest in the operating room. The patient survived. The room eventually quieted down. The nurses began cleaning up. People moved on to the next case.

But I remember standing there afterward feeling exhausted and unsettled. It had been several months since my ACLS recertification, and during the code I caught myself mentally reaching for details of the algorithm that had once felt automatic. I …

Artificial intelligence can prevent a delayed diagnosis

Uday Rajaram

Health Technology

May 18, 2026

The week of Thanksgiving, my dad drove my mom to the emergency room for stomach pain so severe she could not stand up straight. Three days of tests. Specialists rotating in and out. No clear answer. Then, almost miraculously, she started feeling better on her own. The doctors sent her home on Thanksgiving Day with some pain management and a collective shrug. We sat around the table that night genuinely …

Health insurance coverage loss threatens sick children

Mansi Kotwal, MD, MPH

Health Policy

May 18, 2026

In a group text with fellow pediatricians, I received a message asking if anyone knew where a child could get a blood draw that was not the emergency room. The question came from a colleague on behalf of another physician friend. She was worried her son might be anemic because of how he looked pale and was unusually fatigued.

She had just switched jobs and her son was not covered yet …

How cancer care terminology harms patient choices

Zachary Scharf, MD, MBA

Conditions and Diseases

May 17, 2026

“Can we fit just a few more?” This was the question I was asked one snowy evening. Pretty soon, I found myself surrounded by no less than 20 people. They had all convened here to see the man lying in bed at the center of the room. He had struggled with cancer, which had progressed through numerous treatments, leading to his current intubated and sedated state. As an internal medicine …

Breast cancer rehabilitation requires occupational therapy

Marguerite Frank, MOTR/L

Conditions and Diseases

May 17, 2026

“I wish I could get a free boob job.”

It is a comment I heard more than once after sharing I was undergoing a double mastectomy. I understand the impulse, people do not know what to say. But the joke reveals something worth examining: how little most people understand about what this surgery actually costs you.

At 28, I found out I carried the breast cancer gene 1 (BRCA1) mutation. At 34, …

Athletic trainer scope of practice is not a turf war

Gerald Kuo

Conditions and Diseases

May 17, 2026

A high school basketball player lands awkwardly after a fast break. For one second, the gym goes silent. He grabs his ankle. His coach runs toward him. His teammates stop moving. His parents, sitting near the sideline, do not know whether to hope he can stand up or pray that he will not try.

In that first minute, no one is thinking about professional titles. The question is painfully simple: Who …

Hantavirus cruise ship outbreak exposes CDC missteps

P. Dileep Kumar, MD, MBA

Conditions and Diseases

May 17, 2026

The recent outbreak of hantavirus infection on the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius raises several questions and concerns. Dutch ornithologist Leo Schilperoord was the first person to die of hantavirus infection on the ship on April 11, 2026. He and his wife, Mirjam, 69, had recently visited northern Patagonia in Argentina, 1,500 miles north and before boarding the ship at a southern Argentine port. So far there have been eight …

Time pressure in medicine narrows how we see

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

May 17, 2026

Medicine values speed, but patients often reveal themselves slowly.

We are expected to identify the problem, name it, code it, treat it, and move on. That process may be necessary in a pressured system, but it can also mistake a label for understanding.

A diagnosis can be useful. It can guide treatment, open access, and reassure patients. But it can also become a premature ending to a story that still needs to …

How physician therapy sparked a medical career transition

Shahrzad Rafiee, MD

Physician

May 17, 2026

I come from a generation that does not believe in therapy. Not because we do not believe it is effective, but because we believe we can handle things on our own. If things are hard, we push through. If we need help, we figure it out independently. By the time I became a physician, self-reliance was not just a value, it was my tried-and-true survival strategy. I remember years ago, …

Patient involvement transforms modern clinical research

Niharika Singh

Conditions and Diseases

May 17, 2026

In medicine, patients are often seen as recipients of care rather than contributors to it. But their lived experiences bring something data alone cannot: context, meaning, and truth. Early in my exposure to clinical research, I understood it primarily through a quantitative lens. Outcomes were measured in numbers: complication rates, recovery times, and statistical significance. These metrics are essential, but they do not always capture what matters most to patients. …

Evidence-based medicine needs real-world data to evolve

Saurabh Gombar, MD

Health Technology

May 17, 2026

Clinicians are trained to practice evidence-based medicine, yet the realities of care often reveal its limits. In many situations, the literature does not offer clear guidance for the patient in front of us. A large share of clinical decisions are made without high-quality evidence. This is not a failure of clinical judgment. It reflects a gap in how evidence is generated and delivered.

The traditional path from study design to publication …

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