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Family nurse practitioner Erica Dorn discusses her article “ChatGPT in health care: Risks, benefits, and safer options.” In this episode, Erica explains how clinicians are experimenting with ChatGPT to help with HPI …
ChatGPT in medicine: risks, benefits, and safer documentation strategies [PODCAST]
In Minot, I practiced a kind of pediatrics no flowchart could predict: improvised, airborne, and often surgical. Minot didn’t always follow the flowchart. One night, a toddler arrived in the emergency room, inebriated. Her father had given her vodka for teething pain, never imagining she’d swallow it. She did. She stopped breathing. I called a code and began CPR, ordering a blood alcohol level (BAL) and routine labs. Her BAL …
My experiences as an Air Force pediatrician
A brilliant, like-minded cardiologist recently shared with me “A Reappraisal of the Lipid Hypothesis” by Dr. Robert DuBroff, published in The American Journal of Medicine. It should be required reading for every physician who has ever written “continue statin” without a second thought.
DuBroff’s analysis reviewed 29 randomized controlled trials of cholesterol-lowering therapy conducted after modern trial regulations were adopted. The results were quietly devastating:
Re-examining the lipid hypothesis and statin use
An excerpt from How I Know White People Are Crazy and Other Stories. Copyright © 2025 Dr. Jonathan Lassiter. Published by Legacy Lit, a Hachette Book Group company. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
According to Dr. James M. Stedman, a white male clinical psychologist from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, there was a shortage of [doctoral] internships as early as 1976. …
How the internship shortage harms Black students
Racial diversity impacts health care delivery. North American nations like Canada and the U.S. are multi-racial. The U.S. addresses equity via programmatic and regulatory levers layered on a fragmented financing system: Medicaid, the Office of Minority Health’s National CLAS Standards for culturally appropriate services, and targeted maternal and community health initiatives. Nonetheless, persistent racial gaps in insurance, access, and outcomes underscore the limits of non-universal coverage, with maternal mortality for …
How diverse nations tackle health care equity
Mrs. C is 80, frail, with heart failure and early dementia. The team has begun discussing an ICD. Her daughter wants “everything done.” The resident knows the evidence cold; he can recite the trial data, the ACC recommendations, and the mortality benefit. But he’s frozen at the bedside.
The gap we don’t talk about
Modern medical education does one thing brilliantly: It transmits knowledge. Today’s residents master more pathophysiology, more evidence, and …
What is practical wisdom in medicine?
In inpatient psychiatry, teams often face a familiar problem: The clinicians at the bedside see ongoing risk that warrants hospital-level care, while the payer’s reviewer concludes the stay is no longer “medically necessary.” The result can be frustration, rushed discharges, or days spent on the phone. Behind the scenes, costs mount; measured not just in dollars, but in readmissions, emergency department boarding, and clinician burnout. Physician advisors help resolve this …
Aligning psychiatric care and hospital costs
The Bay Area has become the epicenter of artificial intelligence, home to renowned startups and labs racing to prove AI’s power to transform our daily lives.
Just three months ago, California released its own Frontier AI Policy Report, commissioned by Governor Gavin Newsom, which warned that without stronger oversight and transparency, AI models threaten equity and accountability, especially in health care. Nowhere is this danger more urgent than in dermatology.
A …
The dangerous racial bias in dermatology AI
Is your baby’s safe sleep a privilege?
In my Bronx clinic, I often sit across from new families who are well-versed in the American Academy of Pediatrics’ (AAP) safe sleep guidelines. Babies should sleep alone, on their backs, in a crib free of soft bedding and toys. Yet despite this knowledge, many parents, especially those who choose to exclusively breastfeed, face real-life barriers in following these recommendations. For single mothers and …
How pediatricians can address infant mortality in underserved communities
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Kidney transplant recipient Charlie Cloninger and nephrologist Nauman Shahid discuss their article “How early care saved my life from silent kidney disease.” Charlie shares his personal story of being diagnosed with kidney …
How early intervention and team-based care can change kidney disease outcomes [PODCAST]
John, a man in his early sixties, waited nine months to see me about memory problems. When he finally arrived, I had twenty minutes. Eighteen went to detective work, extracting fragments of history from conflicting accounts, piecing together months of decline from unreliable memories, and completing a paper-based subjective memory test. What should have been a full consultation of patient-focused care, was reduced to only a few hurried minutes at …
Why our health system fails chronic disease patients
This summer, my Facebook account was permanently “disabled.”
I had been helping another mother navigate a medical decision for her child, a young adult who is living with a degenerative condition. It wasn’t medical advice. It was empathy, drawn from my own lived experience as a medical mother, a certified coach, and years of teaching courageous communication at a medical school.
Meta AI had flagged the conversation as a violation of Community …
AI moderation of online health communities
As a physician, you are no stranger to complexity. From the first days of medical school to the years of long shifts in residency, you make high-stakes decisions every day. Yet many doctors tell us they feel too busy, or under-resourced, to give their money the same level of care.
That is where a Personal CFO helps. Just as a hospital relies on a chief financial officer to align budgets, risks, …
Why physicians need a personal CFO and how tax mitigation fits in
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Not long ago, a patient came to my busy clinic holding her phone. She had recently watched one of my short educational videos on heart attack warning signs, in Bengali. She told me, “Doctor, I did not know women can have different symptoms than men. That is why I came in today.”
That heartfelt conversation might have truly saved her life. And it was made possible not inside a hospital, but …
Why doctors must fight misinformation online
As a urologist, I consider myself an expert on the subject of prostate cancer. Here is a urologist’s view of a hypothetical announcement from a former U.S. president, five months after leaving office, of widespread high-grade metastatic prostate cancer.
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in males. It begins as a cancer in the prostate, and with progression, metastatic disease occurs, primarily in the axial skeleton. Prostate cancer is known …
A urologist’s perspective on presidential health transparency
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Psychiatrist, internist, and addiction medicine specialist Muhamad Aly Rifai discusses his article “It’s time to operationalize physician wellness.” Muhamad explains why wellness cannot remain a slogan or a poster …
Why physician wellness must be treated as a core business strategy [PODCAST]
I thought of this while watching the Cincinnati Open tennis today. Between games, a sports drink ad flashed on screen claiming it “hydrates better than water.” The players kept chugging neon bottles, and the announcer repeated the tagline like gospel.
That is when it hit me: For recovery, I would still reach for milk.
Hydration is more than water replacement.
Hydration is not just about replacing fluids; it is about keeping them in …
The science of hydration: milk vs. sports drinks
I can sit with patients and families and talk about hospice, dementia, or end-of-life care without hesitation. Years of training as a physician and geriatric psychiatrist have prepared me for those conversations. But when my own parent needed care, all that training suddenly felt useless.
Medical knowledge didn’t shield me from fear or guilt. It didn’t stop the second-guessing that came with every decision. It didn’t help me navigate the family …
Why caring for a parent is hard for doctors
I was not just a contributor. I was the pediatrician in the room, the one who translated clinical reality into research clarity, even when the system preferred abstraction.
From 1997 to 2003, I lived a six-year burst of energy: equal parts clinical invention, research precision, and institutional resistance. It was my Trinity Site: a catalytic moment where everything fused: rural care delivery, editorial rigor, and systems reform. The fallout still shapes …
A pediatrician’s role in national research
A demographic shift in viewership
With the rise of streaming, one platform is surging to prominence. According to Nielsen’s March 2025 report, YouTube now commands the highest total TV usage share of any media company at 11.6 percent. This marks a 53 percent increase in viewership compared to two years ago. But it is not because of younger generations sensationalized “addiction” with phones. It is a surge driven largely by …
How older adults became YouTube’s steadiest viewers and what it means for Alphabet
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