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Family physician Dan Muntean discusses the article, “The heart of family medicine: a doctor’s journey of compassion and care.” In this episode, Dan shares his personal journey through 30 years of practice …
Embracing compassion in family medicine [PODCAST]
Is caring the missing ingredient in health care leadership?
As physicians and health care professionals, we are called to care for patients, their families, and trainees. Yet, the health care team is often not cared for by leaders. This has resulted in staggering rates of burnout. It has led to many physicians and nurses leaving the field, creating more stress on an already overworked workforce. The question is: How …
Leading with care: How health care leadership can transform patient and provider well-being
I grew up in a medical family, primary care. I’ve worked in the medical field for 40 years, from the front office to the back, lab to radiology. I’ve been a registered nurse for 33 years and a family nurse practitioner for 30 years. I have worked in hospitals, private practices, federally qualified health centers (FQHC), hospice, and corporate health. I am deeply passionate about my calling—caring and advocating for …
The hidden crisis in health care: How corporate greed is destroying patient care
Once upon a time, in the curious land of Wonderland, there lived a physician named Alice. On a curiouser and curiouser day, Alice found herself tumbling down the digital rabbit hole into a fantastical realm called Algorithmia, a land where the wonders of artificial intelligence (AI) shaped the very fabric of life. Guided by the enigmatic Mad Hatter, Alice encountered three peculiar AI Cheshire Cats—Transforma (transformers), Baye (Bayesian methods), and …
How AI is revolutionizing health care through the lens of Alice in Wonderland
As physicians, we dedicate our lives to helping others. We spend years training to diagnose, treat, and care for patients with a dream of feeling valued and helpful. Then, one day we find ourselves feeling increasingly overwhelmed by administrative work, struggling to keep up with patient communication, and feeling disconnected from the people we set out to serve. The reality is that many of us are caught in a system …
I’m only sharing this story today to illustrate something about myself and my perspective on love: being expressive with it.
I am not discussing only romantic love here. I’m talking about the affection we have for so many individuals around us, including our parents, siblings, friends, teachers, coworkers, neighbors, pets, and even strangers.
Sometimes we fall in love with a random person’s actions, something they say, the way …
Why I refuse to hide my emotions in a world afraid of love
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Lianne Mandelbaum, a leading advocate for airline safety measures to protect food-allergic passengers, discusses the article, “Navigating the uncertainty of food allergies in air travel: a call for compassion and change.” In …
Compassionate solutions for food allergies in air travel [PODCAST]
Despite the heralded To Err Is Human, there is still no effective risk management strategy to prevent medical liability. Past discussions on KevinMD have explored a risk-management strategy that differentiates medical errors from random errors of nature with 95 percent confidence. Like any decision-making method, this strategy has weaknesses that deserve mention.
Weaknesses of the strategy
The missing link in medical malpractice: a strategy to reduce lawsuits
Becoming a doctor is often seen as a noble quest—a path filled with sacrifice, resilience, and the ultimate reward of helping others. We all start the same way: pre-med studies, endless exams, and the grueling four years of medical school. It’s a journey filled with sleepless nights, skipped meals, and cramming obscure diseases into our already overloaded brains. But we keep going, fueled by the dream of finally being called …
The truth about burnout in medicine: a journey of gladiators, night shifts, and humanity
I was approaching the final rotations of my third year in medical school when it came time to create my fourth-year schedule. I wanted to participate in electives that aligned with my passions for advocacy and addressing health disparities but were also unique. That’s when I stumbled upon a few courses at a nearby law school that explored the intersection of law and medicine.
Though I knew the course was offered …
How a law school elective changed my perspective on medicine
Perpetually late to the game, I was watching The Crown on my laptop Friday night, the wonderful episode set in the summer of 1969, when astronauts landed on the moon. While the world gazed into the heavens, series creator Peter Morgan looked around here on Earth and asked, What does it all mean?
Contrasted against this crowning scientific achievement was the Duke of Edinburgh’s personal crisis of faith. When NASA launched, …
What The Far Side taught me about belonging in science
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Family physician Tony Gerk discusses the article, “Even medical practices aren’t immune from the high cost of employer-provided health insurance.” In this episode, Tony explains the challenges small medical practices face due …
Rising health insurance costs challenge small medical practices [PODCAST]
How do I get accepted to medical school? This is the question at the forefront of every premedical student’s mind. As the competitiveness of each medical school application cycle increases and it feels like all those applying have cured cancer, dedicated their entire lives to some amazing community service effort, achieved a perfect MCAT score, and found time to invent a time machine, the importance of good writing and weaving …
How to write essays that get you into medical school
A recent Time magazine article, “Women Live Longer Than Men—But Not in Medicine,” confirmed what many of us have long felt in our bones: Being a woman in medicine comes at a cost.
A staggering one.
Women physicians are dying younger than male physicians. Younger than women in the general population.
And that’s just what the mortality data shows.
The morbidity—the chronic health issues, the …
The cost of caring: How medicine is shortening the lives of women physicians
The electronic health record (EHR) has solved the illegibility issue of handwritten notes, but the downside and unintended consequences have been of equal or greater importance. The cult of the EHR “copy and paste” (CP) club in hospital care makes defending a Medicare billing audit a daunting task should a physician be required to justify their level of professional billing codes. The much more important issue, however, is that patient …
How copy and paste in EHRs is hurting patient care
Imagine this: Two attending surgeons undertake a surgical procedure on a patient. The surgical residents have draped the patient; the surgical tech and the circulating nurse are ready to begin the operation. The surgical attendings enter the OR, scrub in, and move to the next order of business: “How are we going to bill for this procedure?”
Often, there is an unspoken—and spoken—consensus that the medical field is a lucrative one. …
The hidden financial burdens shaping modern medicine
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Internal medicine physician Corinne Rao discusses the article, “The Faustian bargain of modern medicine.” In this episode, Corinne explores the modern health care system’s trade-offs, comparing the traditional independence of private practice …
Unpacking the Faustian bargain of modern medicine [PODCAST]
Throughout my residency, I’ve had the opportunity to perform autopsies on many different people from different walks of life. One case in particular stood out to me. The decedent was not in the greatest state of health at the time of death and subsequent postmortem examination. After I removed his heart from the pericardial sac and began dissecting each coronary artery in sequential tangential sections back to their origins on …
If you want perspective on life, then dissect a human heart
The song from the Broadway musical Hamilton, “(Yorktown) The World Turned Upside Down,” is stuck in my head. Indeed, these are no ordinary times. We have a measles outbreak in the U.S. that has resulted in numerous …
Match Day 2025: Protecting our students’ futures
My wife once told me, “It was like everyone was your friend.” And she may be right. I connect well with others and take an honest interest in them. In practice, I always ask where they are from. I find that a great opener, and even Alzheimer’s patients and the elderly can often answer that one. I have done that since my paramedic days.
Don’t get me wrong, though, as I …
When protocol kills: a tragic lesson from the ER
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