KevinMD.com

October 1, 2026Oct 1, 2026

I love being a doctor. I do not enjoy many aspects of practicing medicine in the U.S. health care system. In the struggle to balance these truths, mentorship from several extraordinary physicians has steadied me. As gifted diagnosticians and models…

I return to these mentors’ words often. Their guidance provides a framework I use to …

Policy

Climate anxiety in young people demands action in 2026

October 1, 2026Oct 1, 2026

As medical students who will inherit and treat the health consequences of climate change, we are witnessing how it reshapes the physical and emotional landscapes of our generation. These fears are actively shaping how an entire generation plans its future, from whether to have children to where to live and work. Across the country, young people are experiencing what researchers have termed eco-anxiety: chronic stress, fear for the …

Patients

Why patient-owned health records beat a portal login

Jessica Chalk

October 1, 2026Oct 1, 2026

On KevinMD, patient advocate Monica McEathron wrote about a note in her medical record that labeled her insulin pump a "primary weapon." Her endocrinology team later documented that the insulin correction was appropriate and that the dangerous low came from…

On KevinMD, patient advocate Monica McEathron wrote about a note in her medical record that labeled her insulin pump a “primary weapon.” Her endocrinology team later documented that the insulin correction was appropriate and that the dangerous low came from a device communication failure. The note stayed in her chart anyway, waiting for the next emergency clinician to read it before reading anything else.

I read her piece twice. Then …

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Physicians

Blame culture in medicine leaves young doctors traumatized

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

October 1, 2026Oct 1, 2026

It plays out like a modern-day digital horror movie. On my social media feed, a snippet of a horribly sad drama catches my eye: A young woman, devastated and paralyzed by an unimaginable tragedy, has taken the lives of her own children. She had previously been under medical care, presenting with a complex psychiatric history that navigated the difficult waters often met with multiple therapies: antidepressants, anti-anxiety agents, and various …

Tech

Will AI replace doctors? That is the wrong question.

Brandy Zachary, DC

October 1, 2026Oct 1, 2026

For most of my life, I have experienced medicine from both sides of the exam table. As a patient, I spent years on Social Security disability and accumulated diagnoses across specialties. At one point, I had my brain electrocuted twenty times for what ultimately turned out to be an infection. Eventually, a primary immunodeficiency helped explain why so many unrelated things had happened to me.

I went on to train more …

Physicians

Direct-to-consumer drug ads sell lifestyle, not physiology

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

October 1, 2026Oct 1, 2026

Direct-to-consumer drug advertising has changed dramatically over the past decade. What began as cautious messaging about serious medications has evolved into lifestyle marketing: smiling actors, golden retrievers, and promises of freedom, energy, and "getting back to what matters." The problem…

The problem is simple. Many of these drugs are not lifestyle enhancers. They are immune-altering, metabolic-altering, or infection-risk-altering agents. And the public is not hearing the truth.

As a developmental-behavioral pediatrician, I spent decades …

Policy

First Nations mental health care must not end at discharge

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

October 1, 2026Oct 1, 2026

An emergency department can stabilize a mental health crisis. It cannot, by itself, provide the relationships, housing, and continuing support that sustain recovery. For First Nations patients in Canada, we should promote mental health and substance use services that communities help govern, and patients can reach before, during, and after a crisis. For example, a patient receives instructions to arrange counseling, attend substance misuse therapy, and return if symptoms worsen. …

Diagnosing the data: Applying clinical rigor to AI adoption [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

October 1, 2026Oct 1, 2026

This episode is brought to you by ModMed. Fear of AI is not the problem. Refusing to test it is. Eric Jennings, a board-certified, fellowship-trained ophthalmologist and the senior medical director of ophthalmology at ModMed, argues that hesitancy about AI…

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This episode is brought to you by ModMed.

Fear of AI is not the problem. Refusing to test it is. Eric Jennings, a board-certified, fellowship-trained ophthalmologist and the senior medical director of ophthalmology at ModMed, argues that hesitancy about AI is a protective clinical instinct, and that the right response …

Podcast

Why more medicine isn’t making us healthier [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

America spends nearly a fifth of its economy on health care, yet chronic disease keeps rising and prevention lags. Narinder Singh Parhar, an internist and intensivist with four decades of experience across outpatient, hospital, and ICU care, argues that American…

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Education

Clinical experience for pre-meds shapes career choices

Amit Pandey, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

An excerpt from The Premed Paradox. As I had seen my senior residents do in the past, and without a second thought, I picked up the sterile gauze, folded it over to create a padded protection from the glass of…

An excerpt from The Premed Paradox.

As I had seen my senior residents do in the past, and without a second thought, I picked up the sterile gauze, folded it over to create a padded protection from the glass of the lidocaine vial, and snapped off the top as required. To my absolute shock, I immediately felt the glass tip of the vial penetrate both gauze padding and sterile glove, …

Education

Lessons from a pediatrician in conversation with her son

Loretta Cody, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

Intro My son is presently in his second year of internal medicine residency. When he was about to enter medical school, my older son thought it might be interesting for this "about to become a doctor" and his mother, "a…

Intro

My son is presently in his second year of internal medicine residency. When he was about to enter medical school, my older son thought it might be interesting for this “about to become a doctor” and his mother, “a long-time doctor,” to have a conversation about the journey. I realize now after transcribing and editing our conversations that this was much more than my life as a pediatrician; it was …

Tech

The patient’s story has no place in the electronic record

Michael Duben, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

About 80 percent of a diagnosis comes from the patient's story. The electronic health record has no place to keep it. I learned the first half of that in my second year of medical school, in a physical diagnosis lecture…

About 80 percent of a diagnosis comes from the patient’s story. The electronic health record has no place to keep it.

I learned the first half of that in my second year of medical school, in a physical diagnosis lecture by the late Dr. Arthur Aufses Jr., chairman of surgery at Mount Sinai for 22 years and a man of extraordinary skill and intellect. In that lecture, he said that about …

Patients

Older adults refusing help may need choices, not arguments

Ian Hu & Pao Hsuan Huang

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

My phone lit up in the dormitory: "Can you come back after camp? Mom needs you to help persuade Grandma." I was at a summer program in Seattle. I booked the earliest flight I could, already marshaling arguments in my…

My phone lit up in the dormitory: “Can you come back after camp? Mom needs you to help persuade Grandma.”

I was at a summer program in Seattle. I booked the earliest flight I could, already marshaling arguments in my head: statistics on cognitive decline, studies about social engagement, the kind of evidence-based reasoning I had absorbed from years of watching people around me in Silicon Valley try to optimize everything, …

Patients

Delayed Parkinson’s diagnosis: when symptoms don’t fit

Stephanie Hanko

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

In October 2024, I finally heard the word that made sense of five years of confusion: Parkinson's. For years, my symptoms didn't align with the diagnoses I was given, and each specialist saw only a piece of the puzzle. What…

In October 2024, I finally heard the word that made sense of five years of confusion: Parkinson’s. For years, my symptoms didn’t align with the diagnoses I was given, and each specialist saw only a piece of the puzzle. What changed everything was the moment a movement-disorder specialist looked at my symptoms as a whole and recognized the pattern immediately.

When symptoms don’t fit the labels

My first symptom appeared in 2019: …

Physicians

Why antipsychotics for depression need physician oversight

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

Atypical antipsychotics have quietly migrated from inpatient psychiatry to primary care offices, urgent care clinics, and telemedicine platforms staffed increasingly by nurse practitioners and advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs). The drugs have not changed. Their risks have not changed. What has changed is who is prescribing them, and how casually they are being marketed to the public. These medications were designed for psychosis, bipolar disorder, and acute agitation. They now …

Physicians

What if emotional immaturity has always been endemic?

Deepak Gupta, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

Looking at emotional maturity through an epidemiological lens may unravel the endemic status of emotional immaturity in postmodern humanity. Is its epidemic proportion a new-age phenomenon? Has its endemicity been innate since the dawn of humanity? Does it extend beyond humanity into the nonhuman systems that humans devise? Humans have long invented historical myths and fictional entities in order to organize nonhumans and to prevail over them by tradition. Are …

Conditions

When can you have sex after hip replacement surgery?

Cory Calendine, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

Every joint replacement patient leaves my office with a plan. When to walk, how to ice, when to drive, when to come back. We talk about stairs, showers, sleep, and the first night home. What most of them do not leave with is an answer to a question they are thinking about and almost never ask: When can I have sex again?

They don’t ask, and too often we don’t offer. …

Policy

Coverage cuts strengthen the case for Medicare for All

Bruce A. Silverman, MD

September 30, 2026Sep 30, 2026

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) lays bare a brutal truth about American health care: When coverage depends on politics, paperwork, employment status, and state budgets, people lose care, and some will die because of it. Cuts and administrative barriers to Medicaid, new hurdles for Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage, and continued failure to guarantee stable access to care all point in the same direction: Our fragmented system …

Podcast

Amazon and Uber set the bar that primary care is judged against [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

A car shows up when you click a button and groceries arrive by tonight, but a doctor's appointment takes weeks. Payam Zamani started MY DR NOW while he was still a resident, in a clinic of twelve hundred square feet,…

Listen on Apple Podcasts · Spotify

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A car shows up when you click a button and groceries arrive by tonight, but a doctor’s appointment takes weeks. Payam Zamani started MY DR NOW while he was still a resident, in a clinic of twelve hundred square feet, and now runs more than eighty of them as …

Conditions

Brain capital: the $11.7 trillion case for brain health

Alice Luo Clayton, PhD

September 29, 2026Sep 29, 2026

A new kind of capital For decades, we have treated brain health solely as a medical issue, something to address only when it begins to fail. That's beginning to change, as more experts recognize that the capabilities of the human…

A new kind of capital

For decades, we have treated brain health solely as a medical issue, something to address only when it begins to fail. That’s beginning to change, as more experts recognize that the capabilities of the human mind (our ability to think, adapt, learn, and make decisions) impact more than just the day-to-day lives of individuals. They influence the well-being and stability of families, workplaces, populations, and society …

Real physician voices, twice a week

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