Loneliness in successful men hides behind abundance

Conditions and Diseases
June 21, 2026

My friend Barry has money galore that makes people assume he shouldn’t have any problems at all. He runs a thriving real estate business, owns multiple homes, collects cars, spends weekends on his boat, comes from a family most people would envy, has friends, and can buy expensive tchotchkes, little throwaway things he could replace without a second thought. On paper, he has everything. But every time I saw him, …

Read more…

Loneliness in successful men hides behind abundance

Dark money is writing your health care laws [PODCAST]

Podcast
June 20, 2026
YouTube video

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

Patients are being cut off from medications they need, doctors are afraid to prescribe, and the reason traces back to political donations most Americans never see. Richard A. Lawhern, health care educator and patient advocate, joins us to explain how lobbying money …

Read more…

Dark money is writing your health care laws [PODCAST]

How anchoring bias in medicine missed a heart attack

Conditions and Diseases
June 20, 2026

3 a.m. was the time I witnessed a case that changed the way I think.

He came in complaining of epigastric pain. He had eaten a whole chicken that night, a heavy meal, a simple explanation. The residents in the emergency department, exhausted at the end of a 15-hour shift and overwhelmed by the crowd of patients around them, gave him an IV H2 blocker and left him for monitoring. He …

Read more…

How anchoring bias in medicine missed a heart attack

Why a Hulu comedy’s food allergy myths are dangerous

Conditions and Diseases
June 20, 2026

Food allergy has long been one of the few life-threatening medical conditions that society still treats as entertainment. For years, it has been the punchline in comedies. More recently, it has appeared as a convenient murder weapon in television dramas and thrillers. Now, in a recent comedy series, viewers are presented with something arguably just as dangerous: a storyline built around nearly every major misconception the public holds about food …

Read more…

Why a Hulu comedy’s food allergy myths are dangerous

Why frontline health care workers get no mental support

Physician
June 20, 2026

The morning started the way too many did, with the phone ringing through the shower. I wiped the soap from my face and ran, already knowing what waited for me. A bloody, screaming child.

That is the job. Trauma and critical care surgery on the front line, for twenty years.

I co-founded the largest social platform for surgeons because we needed somewhere to tell the truth about this work. Today, I share …

Read more…

Why frontline health care workers get no mental support

The physician financial literacy gap nobody addresses

Physician Finance
June 20, 2026

When I started earning a real income as a surgeon, I was thirty-two years old and financially illiterate. Nobody had taught me anything about money. Not medical school. Not my mentors. Not the hospital. Not the senior surgeons I admired.

I knew how to stop bleeding. I did not know how compound interest worked.

That personal anecdote is not the point. The point is that it is not personal at all. It …

Read more…

The physician financial literacy gap nobody addresses

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 …

Read more…

A physician’s involuntary psychiatric hold, from inside

Environmental exposures and cancer: the missing question

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 …

Read more…

Environmental exposures and cancer: the missing question

AI replacing doctors is not the point of AI in medicine

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 …

Read more…

AI replacing doctors is not the point of AI in medicine

How to recognize AI and health anxiety in medicine

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. …

Read more…

How to recognize AI and health anxiety in medicine

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

Podcast
June 19, 2026
YouTube video

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 …

Read more…

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

Why resident mistreatment puts patient care at risk

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 …

Read more…

Why resident mistreatment puts patient care at risk

Patient access is where good care quietly breaks down

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 …

Read more…

Patient access is where good care quietly breaks down

ADVERTISEMENT

Wealth inequality is a clinical problem, not political

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 …

Read more…

Wealth inequality is a clinical problem, not political

5 ways physicians can shape health care investing

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 …

Read more…

5 ways physicians can shape health care investing

AI in medical education needs to read widely

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 …

Read more…

AI in medical education needs to read widely

Professional identity in medicine has been hollowed out

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 …

Read more…

Professional identity in medicine has been hollowed out

Why medical simulation training belongs in every rotation

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 …

Read more…

Why medical simulation training belongs in every rotation

Opioid pain contracts turn doctors into parole officers

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, …

Read more…

Opioid pain contracts turn doctors into parole officers

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

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 …

Read more…

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

1561
pages