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How measuring physician shortages reveals hidden gaps

Health Policy

August 17, 2026

Physician shortage forecasts influence everything from residency expansion to rural workforce policy. But many of those forecasts begin with a deceptively simple question: How many physicians are practicing?

A physician with a full clinical schedule and a physician approaching retirement who sees patients only a few days each month may both appear as one physician in a workforce database. Yet their contributions to patient care differ dramatically. When workforce planning relies …

Most physician burnout interventions remove no work

Amir Atabeygi, MD, MHA and Christina Mitchell, MHA

Conditions and Diseases

August 17, 2026

A colleague recently reduced her clinical schedule from full time to 0.8 full-time equivalent (FTE). She did not want to practice less medicine; she was trying to make the job sustainable. Afterward, she told me that 0.8 still felt like full time.

That is the part health care leaders need to understand. Reducing scheduled patient visits does not automatically reduce the work that surrounds them. Test results still arrive, patients still …

Post-vaccination syndrome treatment update for 2026

Harry Oken, MD

Medications

August 16, 2026

A year ago, I wrote about post-vaccination syndrome (PVS) after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination as a real, patient-reported problem that remains poorly defined and understudied. I described my wife’s experience and called for serious study of patients with persistent symptoms after vaccination.

My wife’s prolonged, relapsing illness prompted me to write publicly about PVS. Her symptoms began approximately two weeks after her third mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in late 2021. Since then, …

Cancer survivorship care goes silent after treatment

Patty Walker

Conditions and Diseases

August 16, 2026

I still remember the day my last active cancer treatment ended. The oncology team celebrated the clear scans. “No evidence of disease,” they said with smiles.

Then, almost overnight, the frequent visits, the attentive calls, and the sense that someone was watching over me simply vanished. Welcome to that disorienting space between finishing intense cancer treatment and figuring out how to actually live again.

Today’s oncology clinics run on efficiency. You get …

Bias in peer review can protect institutions, not evidence

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Conditions and Diseases

August 16, 2026

Peer review is often described as the safeguard of scientific integrity: the mechanism that ensures rigor, accuracy, and accountability. In medicine, we teach trainees that peer review is the backbone of trustworthy science. But peer review is also a human system, shaped by the same institutional pressures, assumptions, and blind spots that shape clinical practice. When those pressures dominate, peer review can stop protecting evidence and start protecting institutions. My …

Rethink why inflammation persists before suppressing it

Narinder Singh Parhar, MD

Conditions and Diseases

August 16, 2026

Inflammation is having an important moment in cardiovascular medicine. That is appropriate. Atherosclerosis is unquestionably an inflammatory disease. Chronic inflammation participates in plaque initiation and progression, plaque instability, thrombosis, and ultimately myocardial infarction and stroke.

But a recent clinical trial gives us reason to ask a question that may take us one step further: not whether inflammation matters, but why inflammation persists in the first place. Before attempting to suppress it, …

Rituals in primary care restore what screens erase

Tom Peteet, MD, MPH, MEd

Physician

August 16, 2026

A social worker lights a single candle, and the entire primary care staff watches the flame. In turn, we jot the names of deceased patients on slips of paper. When moved to speak, we place a name in the basket. Sometimes we speak. For Ian, whose laugh could light up a room. Other times, we bear witness in silence and sit back down. The gathering feels recent, but it last …

Medical device monopolies drive up health care costs

Lars Thording, PhD

Health Policy

August 16, 2026

U.S. health care performs very poorly compared with health care in other developed countries. Held up against 10 nations that we usually compare ourselves with, we are dead last on overall performance.

Source: “Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System. Comparing Performance in 10 Nations,” The Commonwealth Fund.

And it is not because we don’t spend enough money on health …

California’s 2026 AI therapy debate is missing families

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

Health Policy

August 16, 2026

Every voice quoted in The Times’ recent coverage of Senate Bill 903 (SB 903), “As AI ‘therapists’ dish out advice, California lawmakers try to set some limits,” belongs to an institution: a legislator, a professional association, a labor union, a tech-industry lobbyist, a bioethicist. Missing from that debate is the voice of the people already living with the consequences: families managing serious mental illness, for whom this isn’t a …

The neuroscience of physician burnout nobody teaches

Alex P. Michael, MD

Physician

August 16, 2026

There is a moment every surgeon remembers.

A minute earlier, it was an ordinary case, someone complaining about the overnight appendectomy they had to come in for, someone else describing upcoming vacation plans. Yacht rock playing quietly in the background. Then everything quickly changes. A vessel tears, filling the field with blood midsentence. The anesthesiologist’s tone sharpened as the blood pressure began to fall, and every eye in the room turned …

Return-to-play decisions begin long before the whistle

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

August 16, 2026

Friday nights are loud.

The student section is impossible to miss. Faces painted in school colors, homemade signs held high, voices already hoarse before kickoff. The marching band fills every pause with music while parents and grandparents search the field for familiar jersey numbers. I hardly notice any of it.

By the time the crowd begins finding their seats, I’ve already been watching the …

Why moral injury in medicine isn’t a personal failing

Grace Torres-Hodges, DPM, MBA

Physician

August 16, 2026

When we started medical school, the deal seemed pretty simple: learn the science, take care of people, and build a career you could be proud of. The path felt straight, the incentives felt clean, and most of us believed that if we worked hard and did the right thing, the system would more or less support us.

Nobody stood at the podium and said, “By mid-career, you’ll be judged by RVUs, …

Workplace violence in health care demands systemic change

American Society of Anesthesiologists

Physician

August 15, 2026

Workplace violence in health care has become one of the most urgent occupational safety crises in the United States. Anesthesiologists, as well as other physicians, nurses, emergency personnel, therapists, technicians, and support staff, routinely face verbal threats, intimidation, physical assault, …

How to verify health insurance coverage abroad before care

Reed Chiu

Conditions and Diseases

August 15, 2026

One of the most misleading words in international medical care is “worldwide.”

A patient sees it in an insurance certificate and assumes the rest will be simple: Find a hospital abroad, show the policy card, and let the insurer settle the bill. Then the hospital asks for pre-authorization, the insurer asks for a treatment plan, and the international department asks whether it is in network. “Worldwide” has become a series of …

How doctors lost it: first the money, then the authority, now the thinking

Michael Duben, MD

Health Technology

August 15, 2026

The so-called deskilling of physicians is a red-hot subject in discussions of AI in health care. I hate the term “deskilling” just about as much as I hate the term “provider.” It is shallow and smacks of the MBA PowerPoint presentation. What is being lost is not some random skill. It is the physician’s core competence: the ability to synthesize a history of present illness and formulate a diagnostic and …

Self-compassion for physicians starts on the pitch

Devina Maya Wadhwa, MD

Conditions and Diseases

August 15, 2026

Author’s note: Throughout this essay, I use the term “football,” the name used throughout most of the world and by FIFA itself. Readers in Canada and the United States may know the sport as soccer, but for the purposes of this reflection, football feels true to both the game and my own connection to it.

It is World Cup season, and I have become completely absorbed in the matches. The drama. …

Why every ICU needs point-of-care EEG at the bedside

Chitra Venkatasubramanian, MD

Conditions and Diseases

August 15, 2026

As a neurocritical care and stroke neurologist at a leading academic medical center, I’ve spent over two decades on the front lines, working with major community hospitals in triaging and receiving critically ill patients from the emergency department (ED) and intensive care unit (ICU). In my world, “Time is Brain” is not just a slogan but a mandate.

Whether it’s stroke or seizure or any acute brain injury, rapid detection of …

How nutrition for polycystic kidney disease changed my life

Melina Messing, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

August 15, 2026

My grandfather died of a chronic kidney disease that he handed down without knowing it: polycystic kidney disease (PKD). My brother and I were born with it, too. It’s progressive and has no cure.

For most of my twenties, I felt physically fine. Channeling my anxiety about the future, I became a biomedical scientist. I spent those years trusting a simple assumption: If anything could change the trajectory of my condition, …

In 2026, the surgical backlog has a training bottleneck

Danny Goel, MD

Medical Education

August 15, 2026

Every conversation about the surgical backlog focuses on the same fix: more OR time, more staff, more beds. That’s necessary, but it treats the bottleneck as a capacity problem. A second bottleneck nobody’s pricing in is how long it takes to produce a surgeon who can operate independently, and that number is quietly getting longer. Cuts in one place always show up in another, and it’s often education that takes …

Leadership without a title starts with people

Regina Portnoy

Conditions and Diseases

August 15, 2026

Some of the most influential leaders I have met over the past 20 years of my career in clinical research never sought the spotlight. They didn’t lead through authority or titles. They led through knowledge, integrity, humility, and the ability to bring out the best in the people around them.

Early in my career, while working on a hematology/oncology unit, I had the privilege of watching a nurse who embodied these …