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Medical expert testimony vs. advocacy in the courtroom

Physician

April 20, 2026

In Opinions, which is section 9.7.1 of the American Medical Association (AMA) Code of Medical Ethics, a physician serving as an expert witness has a duty to act as an objective, independent professional whose opinions are based on science, and not act as an advocate whose opinions win lawsuits. The question, which I now raise, is: “Are opinions expressed by a medical expert, which have 95 percent confidence (the …

25 of 32 years of life expectancy came from this

Richard A. Lawhern, PhD

Medical Education

April 20, 2026

In 1900, life expectancy in the U.S. was 47 years for men and women combined. By 2025, the figure had risen by about 32 years. Many U.S. citizens attribute this increase to the development of modern medicine and widespread availability of antibiotics. However, while antibiotics have indeed contributed, they are overshadowed by changes that most of us take for granted and simply do not think about.

Treatment of public water supplies, …

The family caregiving truth nobody wants to admit

Barbara Sparacino, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 20, 2026

There’s a moment that happens in almost every family caring for an aging parent. It usually begins the same way. Someone leans in, frustrated, exhausted, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting, and says, “My family is crazy.”

As a geriatric psychiatrist, I hear this often. What’s interesting is that everyone says it. Every sibling group thinks the others are unreasonable. Every adult child believes they’re the only one who sees things clearly. Every …

AI medical misinformation fooled every major chatbot

P. Dileep Kumar, MD, MBA

Health Technology

April 20, 2026

Every major AI chatbot fell for bixonimania, a fake disease made up by a team from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, led by researcher Almira Thunstrom. Dr. Thunstrom uploaded two fake studies about a made-up skin condition termed as bixonimania to a preprint server in early 2024. The papers described the disease as characterized by sore eyes and dark pigmentation around the eyes supposedly caused by blue light …

Leaving clinical practice for medical advocacy and purpose

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

April 20, 2026

Two days after Christmas, I walked into a store and saw Easter Cadbury Eggs already on the shelves. Not a single mattress sale for Presidents’ Day in sight. Just a clean leap from tinsel to tulips, as if the world had quietly decided to skip the expected steps and sprint ahead. It struck me because that is exactly what my life feels like right now. For decades, I lived inside …

Evaluating the credibility of major medical journals today

Laurel A. Coons, PhD

Health Policy

April 20, 2026

In recent months, a heated debate has emerged about the credibility of major medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet. Critics, including United States Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior, have argued that these journals are compromised by pharmaceutical industry influence and therefore cannot be trusted. At first glance, the claim may sound extreme. …

The shift from physician clinical intelligence to AI infrastructure

Eric Goldfarb

Health Technology

April 20, 2026

For most of modern medicine, clinical intelligence lived inside physicians. You trained it for more than a decade. Medical school. Residency. Fellowship for some. Then years of repetition. Pattern recognition built one patient at a time. Judgment sharpened by experience. It walked into the exam room with you. It left the hospital at night. It lived in your head. That arrangement is starting to change. Artificial intelligence is beginning to …

How rural health care access impacts maternal mortality

Alyssa Sterner

Health Policy

April 20, 2026

Rural health clinics (RHCs) are Medicaid-funded community-based interventions that significantly improve maternal health in rural areas by increasing access to care. A study done in Egypt, an extremely rural country, showed that community clinics for rural health provided evidence-based interventions that have drastically lowered complication rates during pregnancy. Complications during pregnancy dropped from 38.1 percent to 15.1 percent, and postpartum complications from 81.7 percent to 7.0 percent. Although these solutions …

Trusting clinical intuition to spot an atypical heart attack

Anonymous

Physician

April 19, 2026

An excerpt from Those Shoes: A Physician’s Reckoning with Life, Death and the Medical Machine.

The nurse caught me before I walked in the room, “This next patient says he knows you.” I looked in the room and saw Jim, the gate guard in my neighborhood. “What’s he here for?” “Back pain,” she said, with a look I recognized. “You know what he wants.” I knew what she meant. Back …

How to build a bedtime routine for a consistent sleep schedule

Lindsay Anderson

Conditions and Diseases

April 19, 2026

There is a large amount of evidence showing that keeping a consistent sleep schedule is incredibly important for a variety of health outcomes. Regular schedules are associated with improvements in alertness, health and safety behaviors, inflammation, mental health, cognitive performance, academic performance, sleep duration, and sleep quality. On the other hand, irregular sleep schedules have been linked to worse health outcomes across the board. Even so, sticking to a consistent …

How artificial intelligence scales physician extension

Tod Stillson, MD

Health Technology

April 19, 2026

For more than 25 years, I built physician extension systems. In rural family medicine, if you want your clinical judgment to reach more patients than your two hands can touch in a single day, you build systems. You hire nurses who triage, educate, and even scribe. You bring on a medical assistant who keeps the workflow moving. You eventually collaborate with a nurse practitioner (NP) or physician assistant (PA) who …

The human side of medicine in quiet clinical moments

Devina Maya Wadhwa, MD

Physician

April 19, 2026

From the outside, medicine is often imagined as a profession defined by urgency and dramatic turning points. People picture emergency rooms where rapid decisions determine outcomes, life-saving interventions performed under pressure, and moments when a physician’s action decisively alters the course of illness. These moments certainly exist, and they remain some of the most visible parts of medical practice, but they represent only a small fraction of what most physicians …

Why physician-led AI adoption is essential for health care

Augusta Uwah, MD, MPH

Health Technology

April 19, 2026

A colleague recently reacted to the idea of physician-built AI with a kind of weary cynicism: AI glitches. All AI glitches. I understood what he meant. Many physicians have already lived through one wave of technology that promised efficiency and delivered frustration. We were told electronic medical records would improve care, streamline communication, and modernize medicine. In some ways, they did. But they also inserted screens into the exam room, …

How medical misinformation impacts doctor-patient trust

Kelly Dórea França

Health Technology

April 19, 2026

How does medical misinformation on social media reshape the trust between doctors and patients? As a medical student in my internship, I ask myself this question almost daily. In an era where a quick search or a viral post can feel more convincing than years of medical training, how do we rebuild the fragile bridge of trust between physicians and patients? And perhaps more importantly: How do we, as future …

The hidden struggles of medically complex homebound patients

Kristian Keefer

Conditions and Diseases

April 18, 2026

There is a place some patients end up living when they have complex medical illness. It sits somewhere between stable and emergency, and people like me spend a lot of time there. I live with serious medical conditions that keep me mostly homebound and often bedbound. My days revolve around things many people thankfully never have to think about: feeding tubes, medications, blood pressure swings, heart rate problems, and trying …

How regulating clinical empathy prevents physician burnout

Eva Minkoff & Kim Downey, PT

Conditions and Diseases

April 18, 2026

“When empathy is recognition rather than absorption, it nourishes instead of depletes. It becomes sustainable.” Eva Minkoff shares this thought in our collaborative book, White Coats, Human Hearts, featuring the stories of 11 physicians, two physician spouses, and two patients. Eva has spent her life entrenched in health care, as a chronic patient, physician spouse, and now leadership coach for health care professionals and leaders. Reading those words was an …

Why physical books matter in a social media world

Richard A. Lawhern, PhD

Health Technology

April 18, 2026

My wife and I recently spent a few days on vacation at a South Carolina beach. We took time to stroll on the sand, take naps, kick back, and read. However, in the last-minute rush to pack for our trip, I managed to leave my Kindle at home. Thus, I began the mental journey that resulted in this article.

My Kindle has been one of the nicest gifts my younger daughter …

How CDC opioid guidelines harmed chronic pain patients

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions and Diseases

April 18, 2026

The 2016 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, aggressively promoted by former Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tom Price and CDC Director Tom Frieden, represents one of the most damaging public health missteps in recent U.S. history. Far from curbing the overdose epidemic, CDC guidelines triggered widespread, preventable suffering among legitimate chronic pain patients while leaving illicit fentanyl, the true driver …

How artificial intelligence documentation hurts patients

Brian Hudes, MD

Health Technology

April 18, 2026

If you have spent any time with the current generation of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted documentation tools, you have probably noticed something that is difficult to articulate but impossible to ignore. The notes they produce are correct, grammatically, structurally, and medically, and yet they feel wrong. They read like a summary written by someone who has read every clinical textbook ever published but has never stood at a bedside at 2 …

The hidden risks of AI documentation tools in clinical practice

Elizabeth Vainder, MD

Health Technology

April 18, 2026

Artificial intelligence has already entered the exam room. You may or may not have noticed. In my own practice, I sometimes use an ambient scribe during patient visits. Not for every encounter, but for some. When they work well, they can be incredibly helpful. The system listens to the conversation and generates a draft of the clinical note while the visit is still fresh. It allows me to focus on …

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