Medical satire: A wolf can pass as your doctor now

Physician
August 27, 2026

When I was just a Medium-Sized Bad Wolf loping through the forest, I stumbled upon a doctor in a white coat, carrying a bag of supplies. It was Sunday night, and dinner options were scarce, since most other humans were home with their families.

“Where are you going so late, Doctor?”

She sighed. “Another patient who refused the flu vaccine is sick with the flu, so I’m bringing them Tamiflu.”

I tricked her …

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Medical satire: A wolf can pass as your doctor now

Medicine disposed of physicians long before it feared AI

Physician
August 27, 2026

I am writing this from the slow, disciplined landscape of recovery (one repaired shoulder, one sling, and one unrepairable truth): Medicine did not suddenly become fragile when AI arrived. It did not suddenly become threatened when APRNs and NPs expanded their scope. It did not suddenly become replaceable in the twenty-first century.

Medicine became fragile when institutions discovered they could dispose of physicians and still call it progress.

I know this because …

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Medicine disposed of physicians long before it feared AI

Cognitive assessment in primary care almost never happens

Physician
August 27, 2026

In my primary care practice, few moments carry as much quiet weight as when an older patient leans in and says, “Doctor, I’m worried about my memory.” That moment is increasingly common, given that an estimated 42 percent of adults who reach age 55 will develop dementia in their lifetime, so nearly every family will face a version of it. It takes courage to say those words out loud, …

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Cognitive assessment in primary care almost never happens

Are naked nails in health care just a beauty trend?

Conditions and Diseases
August 27, 2026

“Rich women no longer paint their nails.” Like many provocative declarations born on TikTok, the phrase is exaggerated. Yet it points to a real beauty shift. After years of elaborate nail art, extensions, chrome finishes, and long almond-shaped manicures, the most desirable nails of the moment may be the ones that appear to have nothing on them at all.

The trend has been called “naked nails”: short, natural-looking nails with a …

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Are naked nails in health care just a beauty trend?

Why physician burnout starts with cheap dopamine

Conditions and Diseases
August 27, 2026

The practice of medicine was once anchored to a physical place. Whether it was an office, a hospital, or an outpatient clinic, there was a threshold to cross, a door to close, and a boundary that separated the physician from the patient. Today, that fortress has vanished. We are now connected to our work on a constant basis. Between electronic messages, automated requests for prescription refills, and the endless stream …

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Why physician burnout starts with cheap dopamine

The Seroquel controversy most doctors have forgotten

Medications
August 27, 2026

Few drugs boast the rap sheet of Seroquel (quetiapine). After the pharmaceutical industry marketed atypical antipsychotics like Seroquel as amazingly superior to older antipsychotics like Thorazine and Haldol (pay no attention to their same tardive dyskinesia side effects), Seroquel became its manufacturer’s second-best-selling drug globally, behind only Nexium and netting $5.3 billion in 2011. Many have forgotten Seroquel’s contested past, including how an early proponent went to prison in a …

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The Seroquel controversy most doctors have forgotten

Combat grief is the wound veterans never mourn

Conditions and Diseases
August 27, 2026

Jack, a seventy-six-year-old hospice patient and veteran of the Vietnam War, had time on his hands. Stuck in a hospital bed, looking back on his life, he was increasingly focused on his time as a young infantryman caught up in the “catastrophe of war.”

Looking back and taking stock in one’s life is common as patients approach the end of their lives. In 1963, Robert Butler, MD, called this process Read more…

Combat grief is the wound veterans never mourn

Why telemedicine should be a career, not a side gig [PODCAST]

Podcast
August 26, 2026
YouTube video

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

When his shifts were cut during the pandemic, he took a telemedicine job to pay the bills and ended up loving it. Suneer Chander is an emergency physician who co-wrote the article “Read more…

Why telemedicine should be a career, not a side gig [PODCAST]

AI gave patients answers. They still need judgment.

Health Technology
August 26, 2026

The modern physician is no longer competing with disease alone. The new adversary is expectation: limitless, instantaneous, and increasingly shaped by algorithms.

In the span of a decade, the patient has evolved. First came “Dr. Google, MD” offering a chaotic but empowering flood of information. Then “Dr. PubMed, MD, PhD” sharpening the curious into quasi-specialists fluent in abstracts and endpoints. Now we face the almighty “Prof. AI”: tireless, confident, and available …

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AI gave patients answers. They still need judgment.

Physician addiction is a disease of silence and shame

Physician
August 26, 2026

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025).

In an interview that Dr. Grinspoon did with the New York Post in 2016, “I was a doctor – and a drug pusher,” he describes making a home visit as a medical student to tend to a stage 4 cancer patient. While there, he steals a dozen of the patient’s …

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Physician addiction is a disease of silence and shame

Why nurses are leaving the profession they love

Conditions and Diseases
August 26, 2026

I recently revisited the story of Ramona Pierson, a woman who survived a devastating accident, spent 18 months in a coma, and eventually rebuilt her life with the help of an unexpected community of older adults.

It is an inspiring story. It is also one that raises an important question for those of us who have worked in long-term care: What kind of facility was this?

In retellings of Pierson’s story, the …

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Why nurses are leaving the profession they love

How to run private fund due diligence like a reviewer

Physician Finance
August 26, 2026

I have reviewed manuscripts for more than thirty journals. The habit is always the same. Skip the abstract. Go straight to the methods, because that is where the paper either holds up or falls apart.

Then a fund pitch lands in your inbox and the habit disappears. The deck opens with a big number, and most of us read that number the way we would never read an abstract.

First, the words, …

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How to run private fund due diligence like a reviewer

5 ways to beat mid-career physician burnout

Physician
August 26, 2026

We all have times when we wonder, “Did I choose the right profession? Should I recommend a medical career for my children? Is it time to retire?” These questions creep into the minds of mid-career physicians. We often ask ourselves how we should address the mid-career blahs. What can we do to improve our professional satisfaction? How can we combat the dullness and tedium of our workday lives? And how …

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5 ways to beat mid-career physician burnout

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Is your patient’s new symptom a prescribing cascade?

Medications
August 26, 2026

Modern scientific medicine has given humanity extraordinary tools. Antibiotics transformed once-lethal infections into treatable illnesses. Cardiovascular medications prevent strokes and myocardial infarctions. Insulin, anticoagulants, immunotherapies, psychiatric medications, and countless other treatments have extended and improved millions of lives.

The problem is not medication. The problem begins when our capacity to prescribe becomes greater than our discipline to ask whether every intervention remains necessary. That distinction is increasingly important in an aging …

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Is your patient’s new symptom a prescribing cascade?

Why smart physicians make bad money moves

Conditions and Diseases
August 26, 2026

It is late evening on a Tuesday. Not a remarkably unusual Tuesday, but the typical day that we have all experienced after a hard day at work. She sits alone at the kitchen island after working a 12-hour day in the OR. She is doing something that she has done countless times: moving money back into cash during a time of market volatility.

She knows this is the wrong action to …

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Why smart physicians make bad money moves

Doctors and patients are not the enemy here [PODCAST]

Podcast
August 25, 2026
YouTube video

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

He was sued for a case he barely remembered, and five years later it pushed him out of medicine. It is not just malpractice. Jordan Grumet is an internal medicine physician and the …

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Doctors and patients are not the enemy here [PODCAST]

Being dismissed by a doctor because I stock retail

Conditions and Diseases
August 25, 2026

My story begins the weekend before the Fourth of July. We were celebrating at our friend, the window guy’s, house on June 27th. Tom decided to have the party a weekend early because this year marks the 250th anniversary of our country, and he knew the holiday weekend would be packed with other celebrations.

That Saturday, I had a stinging sensation in my neck and my arm was sore. I was …

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Being dismissed by a doctor because I stock retail

Why cannabis and anesthesia are a high-risk combination

Conditions and Diseases
August 25, 2026

Abstract

Cannabis use is rapidly increasing across the United States following widespread legalization. This trend poses new challenges in perioperative management due to complex pharmacologic and physiologic effects. This review summarizes current knowledge on cannabis interactions with anesthetic agents and highlights associated cardiovascular, respiratory, and gastrointestinal risks. Professional recommendations and best practices are discussed to assist perioperative teams in safely managing patients with recent or chronic cannabis exposure.

Introduction

Cannabis use is increasing …

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Why cannabis and anesthesia are a high-risk combination

What one emergency room shift really costs a doctor

Physician
August 25, 2026

My shift started at 7 a.m. The overnight physician wishes me a good shift. We both know that’s mostly luck. I pick up my first patient before I’ve taken a sip of coffee.

My first few patients are what we affectionately call “bread and butter.” An ankle injury. A cough that’s lingered for two days. Back pain. A medication refill. Someone wants an MRI today because they’ve had headaches for three …

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What one emergency room shift really costs a doctor

How to ask patients about AI chatbots and psychosis

Health Technology
August 25, 2026

In November 2023, before ChatGPT-driven psychosis cases had made a single headline, a Danish psychiatrist named Søren Dinesen Østergaard published a short, almost speculative paper in Schizophrenia Bulletin. His question: Would generative AI chatbots generate delusions in individuals prone to psychosis? At the time, it read like an interesting hypothesis from someone paying close attention to a technology most of psychiatry hadn’t thought much about yet.

This February, Østergaard and …

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How to ask patients about AI chatbots and psychosis

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