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A physician’s involuntary psychiatric hold, from inside

Conditions and Diseases

June 20, 2026

I was never suicidal.

I said the words because I believed I had no other way out.

By then I was restrained, masked, surrounded, and being moved through a medical system I understood too well. I am a physician. I have spent my career in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine. I have managed patients on ventilators, spoken with families at the edge of death, treated sleep and breathing disorders, and taught …

Environmental exposures and cancer: the missing question

Natalia Perez

Health Policy

June 20, 2026

I didn’t learn about environmental health disparities in a classroom. I saw them growing up in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. I remember neighborhoods built from scrap materials, homes close to industrial waste, and families who seemed to face illness more often than chance alone could explain. At the time, I didn’t question it. Now, as I prepare for a career in medicine, I find myself revisiting those memories with a …

AI replacing doctors is not the point of AI in medicine

Michael Turken, MD, MPH

Health Technology

June 20, 2026

Robert Wachter has often discussed the productivity paradox: the frustrating delay between the introduction of a new technology and any actual gain in efficiency. In health care, we’ve lived this paradox through the electronic health record (EHR). We didn’t reinvent the medical record; we simply digitized the paper chart. We added billing artifacts, compliance language, and a deluge of alerts that serve the institution more than the patient.

Now, as generative …

How to recognize AI and health anxiety in medicine

Kamran Shukoor

Health Technology

June 20, 2026

The headache begins

The first time I worried I might have encephalitis, it wasn’t a textbook or professor that fueled my fear, it was the artificial intelligence (AI) on my phone.

It was late at night. I had a dull headache after studying, the kind I’d had dozens of times before. But this time felt different, because now I could interpret it. Earlier that week, we’d covered autoimmune encephalitis in a lecture. …

Why the people funding health care startups have never treated a patient [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

June 19, 2026

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

Most of the people deciding where billions of health care dollars get invested have never treated a patient. Harsha Moole, a physician scientist and health care venture capital founder, joins Kevin to discuss his KevinMD article “The crash cart that taught …

Why resident mistreatment puts patient care at risk

Anonymous

Physician

June 19, 2026

After 20 years in medical practice, I made the decision to return to training for six months as a neonatology fellow to regain my neonatology board eligibility. At 54 years old, I did not come in with illusions. I expected long hours, academic rigor, and the challenge of re-entering a structured training environment after decades of independence.

What I did not expect was to witness, so clearly and so persistently, a …

Patient access is where good care quietly breaks down

Juan Vera

Health Technology

June 19, 2026

After her shift, Rachel noticed the rash beneath her gloves had stopped burning, but it still worried her. She works night shifts as a cook and raises two children, so clinic hours fall when she’s sleeping, commuting, or managing family routines. During her overnight break, she searched on Google and found a clinic with strong reviews. The website did not offer online scheduling, so she had to call. She reached …

Wealth inequality is a clinical problem, not political

Sameen Farooq, MD

Physician

June 19, 2026

We live and work in a sick society. I know this isn’t a revelation as much as a cruel reality. The disparity between those with means and those without is noticeable in every available metric dissecting the spending habits of Americans, credit card indebtedness, retail, stock market portfolios. In this sick system, I am so tired of hearing about the ultra-rich whine and complain about the “difficulties of being …

5 ways physicians can shape health care investing

Harsha Moole, MD

Physician Finance

June 19, 2026

Whenever I speak to physician groups about health care investing, I get the same reaction. Interest first, then a pause. Then someone says, “That sounds great, but I’m not about to quit my practice and become a venture capitalist.”

They don’t have to.

The biggest misconception about physician involvement in health care investing is that it requires a career change. It doesn’t. Over the past seven years, I’ve built a network of …

AI in medical education needs to read widely

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Health Technology

June 19, 2026

An excerpt from Practicing in the Age of AI: Essays on Medicine, Meaning, and Machines.

I recently bought a children’s book for my four-year-old granddaughter. Tucked beneath the copyright page was a sentence I had never seen before: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.”

It wasn’t a medical text. It wasn’t a journal article …

Professional identity in medicine has been hollowed out

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

June 19, 2026

The recent argument that physicians should abandon insurance-based care because the economics no longer work is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The strategist’s view focuses on reimbursement, overhead, and the arithmetic of survival. Those pressures are real. But the deeper crisis in American medicine is not financial. It is cultural.

Insurance-based care didn’t collapse because the math stopped working. It collapsed because the professional culture that once held the system …

Why medical simulation training belongs in every rotation

Chuka Onuh

Medical Education

June 19, 2026

It was my first week of clinical rotations, the transition that I had spent years waiting for. Finally, being able to take care of patients. I was a newly minted clinical-phase medical student assigned an evening shift in a busy Chicago emergency department, eager to learn from clinical experience rather than a textbook or Anki deck.

The shift had been relatively quiet, and only 30 minutes remained as I finished my …

Opioid pain contracts turn doctors into parole officers

Jeffrey A. Singer, MD and Josh Bloom, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

June 19, 2026

The government’s misguided attempt to address the opioid overdoses did more than change prescribing practices. It changed the relationship between doctors and patients, and not for the better.

Before receiving opioid pain medication, many patients today are required to sign a “patient-prescriber agreement,” often called a “pain contract.” The patient agrees to submit to regular drug testing, disclose personal and family histories of substance use, follow strict rules about medication use, …

AMA kratom policy needs regulation, not a 7-OH ban

Bryon Adinoff, MD

Medications

June 19, 2026

An American Medical Association (AMA) policy from June 9, 2026, calls for prohibiting the sale, distribution, and marketing of concentrated 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) products while supporting surveillance, additional research, and other public health measures for kratom, according to the AMA press release and the AMA House of Delegates report. This policy raises an uncomfortable question: Was the AMA duped on 7-OH?

The question is particularly relevant …

Why does periodontal disease hit South Asians harder?

Varsha Mantravadi

Conditions and Diseases

June 19, 2026

“Flossing widens the gaps between my teeth. Besides, these teeth aren’t even my own.”

Absolutely no one can convince my grandmother that flossing is important. Notorious in our family because all of her teeth are now implant crowns, she feels an increased disconnect with these “fake” teeth and doesn’t feel the need to take care of them. Many of her relatives in India confirm her beliefs by misguidedly advising against visiting …

Why clinical trials fail before enrollment even begins

Beata Pasek, EdD

Conditions and Diseases

June 19, 2026

When a clinical trial starts to struggle, the conversation almost always turns to enrollment, with recruitment numbers running low and retention becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as timelines slip and pressure mounts. Sponsors and study teams begin asking how enrollment can be improved, accelerated, or rescued, often treating it as the central problem that needs to be solved.

But after more than fifteen years working inside clinical research operations across academic …

Why is women’s mental health in psychiatry so overlooked?

Jincy Rajan, MD

Physician

June 19, 2026

“Women make up half the population, yet we still do not treat women’s mental health as a priority.”

Today, women’s mental health is a balance between what we know, what we ignore, and what we treat as optional. It exists in a landscape where society continues to find increasingly sophisticated ways to misunderstand it. When women speak, the world often responds with a polite, “Hmm, are you sure?”

I came to psychiatry …

Why doctors burn out connecting with patients, and how to fix it [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

June 18, 2026

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

Most doctors were never taught how to sit with a patient’s grief, anger, or fear without absorbing it. Eva Minkoff, a health care executive coach, and Kim Downey, a physical therapist and physician advocate, join Kevin to discuss their KevinMD article “Read more…

Why doctors burn out connecting with patients, and how to fix it [PODCAST]

Why I say no during a cosmetic surgery consultation

Richard V. Balikian, MD

Physician

June 18, 2026

One of the questions I get asked most often outside of the operating room has nothing to do with facelift techniques or eyelid anatomy.

It usually happens at dinner parties. Someone eventually finds out I’m a facial plastic surgeon, and after a few minutes the question comes: “Do you ever say no to patients?”

I always laugh because the answer is immediate. Absolutely. All the time. It’s my favorite thing to say. …

The generalist physician hiding in every specialist

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

June 18, 2026

The definition of a “doctor” is shifting in a way that feels increasingly fragmented. Growing up with a father who practiced for decades as a primary care physician before pursuing a residency in pediatrics, my baseline understanding of medicine was rooted in the “whole doctor” model. In that world, a physician addressed the majority of a patient’s needs and sought specialized intervention only when a situation truly demanded it. Today, …

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