Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!
Health care executive Chris Darland discusses their article “Why remote patient monitoring needs a preventive shift.” Chris explains that remote patient monitoring is currently too reactive, functioning as a safety net that …
Proactive monitoring can prevent emergencies by catching heart signals early [PODCAST]
As a physician who lives and has practiced in NYC, the largest nursing strike in the city’s history has broken my heart. It has saddened me that our nurses could not be the heroes they truly are and that hospitalized patients experiencing some of the worst days of their lives had not received the best quality care that they could and should get.
And this is just the start of a …
Health care affordability crisis: lessons from the NYC nursing strike
At a recent CES show, a “longevity mirror” was introduced that can estimate your health from a brief facial scan and assign you a score. No clinician. No exam. Just a number. It is an impressive piece of technology. It is also a useful place to start, because it captures something that is quietly changing in medicine. Patients no longer need us to begin the process.
We are now surrounded by …
How wearable technology is changing the role of physicians
I walked onto my small unit a few minutes before 7 a.m., nurses huddled around one elderly gentleman. A cacophony of alarm bells and call lights went unanswered as the unit’s three overnight staff members attempted to keep him in bed. He voiced his disagreement loudly while climbing over the rails meant to protect his safety. Though he was strong, he was unsteady. Exasperated, the night nurse showed me her …
Workplace violence against nurses: a crisis of systemic failure
On the morning of May 19, 2024, my 74-year-old mother was struggling to breathe at her home in Bastrop, Texas. I called 911, an ambulance arrived, and my mother was transported to a hospital.
What followed was a devastating series of miscommunications and ignored directives that led to unnecessary suffering for her and profound trauma for our family.
A clear directive
My mother’s end-of-life wishes had been clear for a long time: She …
Ignored DNR hospital policy: a family’s tragic end-of-life story
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!
Physical therapist and certified lymphedema specialist Maureen McBeth discusses her article “Beyond BMI: Why weight management must look inside the body.” Maureen explains why common tools like the bathroom scale and body …
Why measuring muscle mass matters more than tracking your weight [PODCAST]
The opioid crisis rages on, and there is plenty of blame to go around: pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors, reckless prescribers, the FDA. One entity that has been overlooked is health insurance, whose incentives pushed chronic pain patients to take opioids in the first place.
Check out your insurance plan and the copays you pay for different services. In one of ours, a generic medication costs $10 a month, at most. Physical …
Health insurance incentives and alternatives to opioids for chronic pain
Independent medicine is often described as nostalgic, a relic of a prior era in which physicians owned small practices and made decisions without corporate oversight. But independence is not nostalgia; it is infrastructure.
Today, nearly 75 percent of physicians in the United States are employed by hospitals, health systems, or corporate entities, according to the American Medical Association. In 2012, that number was closer to 50 percent. Private equity investment in …
Independent medical practice: Why private clinics are essential
Hindsight flatters certainty. Clinical medicine does not. After a bad outcome, everyone becomes smarter. The diagnosis looks obvious. The warning signs seem bright. The missed clue appears unforgivable. In the calm of retrospective review, people ask, “How could the doctor not have seen it?” That question sounds fair. Often, it is not. Real-world medicine does not happen in hindsight. It happens in the presence of noise, time pressure, incomplete information, …
How hindsight bias distorts clinical medicine
Before there were health care systems, insurance companies, or electronic medical records, there was the healer, a person embedded within the community, accountable not only for technical competence but for character.
My medical training outside the United States, while competitive and rigorous, remained service-oriented and community-based. Medicine historically was grounded in cultivated human qualities: humility, accountability, reverence for life, respect, and relational presence. Healing was not limited to scheduled interventions; it …
Do no harm: Why physician burnout requires bottom-up reform
Faith implies trust: confidence in an idea, a system, or a set of principles. In religion, it often requires adherence to divine authority, shaped by interpretation and tradition. Over time, those traditions can harden into dogma, discouraging curiosity and resisting ideas that challenge the prevailing worldview. This is not unique to religion. Any system that depends on belief risks the same fate.
When contradictions within a belief system become impossible to …
Institutional distrust in health care: Why a doctor lost faith
An excerpt from Your Child Is Not Their Weight: Parenting in a Size-Obsessed World, with permission from the American Academy of Pediatrics, 2026.
A friend and colleague who is a doctor in adult medicine made this comment to me several years ago: “My patients with kids have a harder time with their health than those who do not have kids!”
I pointed out to her that the “patients with kids” she …
Communicating health to children: a pediatrician’s guide for parents
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!
Metabolic health educator Kevin Whitt discusses his article “Insulin resistance is not a disease: a metabolic reframe.” Kevin argues that the skyrocketing rates of Type 2 diabetes are not the result of …
Insulin resistance is a survival mechanism, not a broken system [PODCAST]
Regina Townsend, founder of The Broken Brown Egg, writes that “trying to decide if you can emotionally afford the cost of building a Black or Brown family in a world that is concurrently showing you how low they are valued adds additional weight to an already heavy situation.”
Townsend emphasizes the importance of recognizing the lived experiences of women of color: “Infertility doesn’t see color, but my color …
Debunking 4 myths about fertility treatments for women of color
Last year, a 45-year-old woman walked into my screening center in Laurel, MD. She was fit, healthy, and had no symptoms whatsoever. She just wanted peace of mind, the kind of baseline health data that her annual physical could not provide. Ninety minutes later, her whole-body MRI revealed a kidney tumor she did not know existed. No pain. No blood in her urine. Nothing to suggest she was harboring a …
Whole-body MRI screening: a radiologist’s guide to preventive scans
As a pediatric cardiologist, I have spent my career watching children grow. During clinic visits, we track their height, weight, and milestones. We also sit with families and ask what makes their children smile. We might send a toddler to physical therapy for gross motor delay while we also encourage her love of art or music. Years of listening to parents share what their child enjoys has taught me that …
How competency-based education is driving medical education reform
In the thick of the opioid epidemic, there is this widespread fear called “opiophobia,” which basically means people, including patients and doctors, are scared to use opioids even when they are really needed for serious medical issues. This fear comes from the idea that even a short stint on opioids for acute pain, like after surgery, often leads to addiction or worse. John A. Bumpus’s 2025 review in ACS Pharmacology …
The truth about short-term opioid prescribing and opioid use disorder
If you trust the titans of industry, and I do not, we are led to believe that, just around the proverbial corner, the equivalent of C-3PO will arrive to improve health care. How wonderful!
You might remember the fussy, shiny droid, the golden companion of R2-D2 in the Star Wars films. Fluent in over six million forms of communication, C-3PO bubbled with personality, …
AI in health care: Why artificial intelligence cannot replace human empathy
I was trying to be cool, so I recently joined a social media challenge with a simple prompt: “Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me.”
As a hospitalist, physician executive, and burnout architect, my digital footprint is deep. I talk about systemic health care reform, the psychology of exhaustion, and the structural “blueprints” needed to …
AI bias in healthcare: When algorithms erase Black professionals
Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) continues to be a solid option for people dealing with chronic pain that just will not budge with the usual approaches like medications, physical therapy, or injections. It is a minimally invasive way to deliver low-level electrical pulses through electrodes placed in the epidural space near the spinal cord, helping to change how pain signals reach the brain and often providing relief in areas like the …
How spinal cord stimulation offers relief for chronic pain
Get free updates delivered free to your inbox.
