KevinMD.com

September 26, 2026Sep 26, 2026

I'm not a physician. I want to say upfront that this is just a theory; however, working with physicians and being married to one for twenty-one years has sparked a theory I think is worth bringing up. I came to…

I’m not a physician. I want to say upfront that this is just a theory; however, working with physicians and being married to one for twenty-one years has sparked a theory I think is worth bringing up.

I came to these thoughts by helping physicians launch and grow their own independent practices and from co-hosting a podcast with my husband where we spoke to health care workers. On-Call with Dr. Dave …

Podcast

Staying salaried may now be the riskier bet for doctors [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

September 25, 2026Sep 25, 2026

An eye surgeon who used to see forty patients a day now sees one to three in a morning, and he has no staff. Oren Fass, a board-certified ophthalmologist and cataract surgeon, has been an employed physician, a practice owner,…

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Physician

Why I wrote an emergency medicine novel about 1 night

Matt Barmmer, MD

September 25, 2026Sep 25, 2026

Every patient who has spent time in an emergency department knows it's overcrowded. They've sat in the waiting room for hours. They've watched physicians move fast and nurses move faster. They've heard the department through the curtain: the monitor alarms,…

Every patient who has spent time in an emergency department knows it’s overcrowded. They’ve sat in the waiting room for hours. They’ve watched physicians move fast and nurses move faster. They’ve heard the department through the curtain: the monitor alarms, the overhead pages, the sound of a place where everyone is doing too many things at once.

What they haven’t seen is the board.

The board is how an emergency physician experiences …

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Health Technology

Health data privacy with AI starts before you press send

Michael Neely

September 25, 2026Sep 25, 2026

Artificial intelligence is making health information easier to summarize, explain, organize, and discuss. A patient can copy a laboratory report into a chatbot, ask for help understanding a medical term, upload a long history, or use an app to organize questions before an appointment. The convenience is obvious. The data question is less obvious. Before someone pastes a medical history, medication list, diagnosis, insurance document, or other sensitive information into …

Conditions and Diseases

Oluyemisi Famuyiwa, MD, on fertility and PCOS: a KevinMD subscriber spotlight

Subscriber Spotlight by KevinMD

September 25, 2026Sep 25, 2026

Oluyemisi Famuyiwa, MD is a double board-certified reproductive endocrinologist, infertility specialist, and obstetrician-gynecologist, and the founder and medical director of Montgomery Fertility Center in Rockville, Maryland. She has published 21 essays on KevinMD since June 2024 and has been a…

Physician

AI and clinical judgment: why patients still trust doctors

Jennifer Miles-Thomas, MD, MBA

September 25, 2026Sep 25, 2026

I currently split my time between two worlds. I see patients in clinic and also work on AI and innovation in the health system. Most days, the dichotomy is an asset. Some days, it feels like it is two different…

AI has closed much of the knowledge gap in medicine and did it faster than expected. The chart review, the differential diagnoses, the literature search, it …

Physician

Moral injury in medicine is an odyssey without Ithaca

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

September 25, 2026Sep 25, 2026

For those of us who have spent decades practicing medicine across multiple systems, the daily reality feels less like the noble healing art we trained for and more like a corporate assembly line. We watch as science-based, patient-centered care is nickel-and-dimed by administrators into mere metrics. In our exhaustion, we can easily identify with Odysseus. Like the legendary king wandering the dark seas, we feel a profound sense of alienation, …

Conditions and Diseases

Why hearing loss and brain health belong together

Kylee Gabler

September 25, 2026Sep 25, 2026

There are plenty of things we tend to accept as part of getting older: turning the television up, struggling to follow conversations in restaurants, or asking people to repeat themselves because everyone seems to mumble these days. Other signs are…

Other signs are easier to overlook. You stop noticing the microwave beep or refrigerator alert. You miss phone notifications. While none of these seem significant on their own, they capture one of the biggest …

Physician

AI and assisted dying raise questions of accountability

Deepak Gupta, MD

September 25, 2026Sep 25, 2026

It has already been said, "We will die in the system we create." The statement raises a larger question: What do we mean by death? Death can be spiritual through excommunication, economic through expulsion from work, social through eviction from…

It has already been said, “We will die in the system we create.” The statement raises a larger question: What do we mean by death? Death can be spiritual through excommunication, economic through expulsion from work, social through eviction from a community, psychological through exclusion and loss of sanity, or physical through extinction. Birth and death often result from forces beyond an individual’s control. Yet death can also become intentional. …

Physician

Losing your doctor: the grief no health system notices

Timothy Lesaca, MD

September 25, 2026Sep 25, 2026

There is a small, unreasonable part of us that expects our doctors to stay in one place forever. We know better, of course. We know they grow older, become tired, change jobs, and make plans. Yet the person we bring…

There is a small, unreasonable part of us that expects our doctors to stay in one place forever.

We know better, of course. We know they grow older, become tired, change jobs, and make plans. Yet the person we bring our uncertainty to is not supposed to become another uncertainty. We may notice the gray hair without quite imagining the day when someone else opens the door.

Few relationships ask so much …

Conditions and Diseases

Human factors in health care start with better design

Dr. Loshi Rajen

September 25, 2026Sep 25, 2026

I very recently started work at a new hospital as part of a yearly rotation while in training. This hospital has a fire board with the names of staff, followed by two small circles containing the words IN and OUT, and a tiny black magnet that closely resembles a knight from a portable chessboard. The idea, at least at first glance, seems deceptively simple.

Two days into my new job, a …

Podcast

Doctors’ kids miss them, and the family builds its own fixes [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

September 24, 2026Sep 24, 2026

A surgeon's kids FaceTime him from their iPads while he is in the operating room, and he cannot pick up. Alyssa Kressel, a strategic communications professional, has spent more than fifteen years alongside her husband's surgical training. This episode is…

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A surgeon’s kids FaceTime him from their iPads while he is in the operating room, and he cannot pick up. Alyssa Kressel, a strategic communications professional, has spent more than fifteen years alongside her husband’s surgical training. This episode is based on her article “What the children of physicians …

Physician

A national hotline could track bias in physician discipline

Babajide Ogunseinde, MD

September 24, 2026Sep 24, 2026

Becoming a physician is one of the longest professional journeys in America. The path typically requires four years of college, four years of medical school, and three to seven or more years of residency and fellowship training. For surgeons, training…

The investment is financial, professional, and deeply personal. Medical graduates routinely carry substantial educational debt, spend thousands of hours studying, take licensing examinations, …

Physician

The 15-minute appointment is not the boundary of care

Alan P. Feren, MD

September 24, 2026Sep 24, 2026

Care does not have to be finished in one encounter. But it must not be allowed to disappear between encounters. When primary care clinicians say they cannot adequately manage their patients' concerns in 15 minutes, I take that seriously. A…

Care does not have to be finished in one encounter. But it must not be allowed to disappear between encounters.

When primary care clinicians say they cannot adequately manage their patients’ concerns in 15 minutes, I take that seriously. A patient may arrive with a new symptom, several chronic conditions, medications prescribed by different clinicians, and questions about what has changed. The clinician faces that complexity alongside chart review, examination, documentation, …

Conditions and Diseases

Workers’ compensation pain management puts function first

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

September 24, 2026Sep 24, 2026

This population, either injured workers under workers' compensation or personal-injury claimants, faces distinct drivers of delayed recovery, including secondary gain concerns, litigation, workplace psychosocial factors, fear-avoidance beliefs, and system-level incentives that can prolong disability. Guidelines from the American College of…

This population, either injured workers under workers’ compensation or personal-injury claimants, faces distinct drivers of delayed recovery, including secondary gain concerns, litigation, workplace psychosocial factors, fear-avoidance beliefs, and system-level incentives that can prolong disability. Guidelines from the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM), state workers’ compensation medical treatment guidelines (e.g., New York, California), the 2022 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Clinical Practice Guideline for Prescribing …

BRCA mutation status in breast cancer: My approach to timing, testing and treatment

AstraZeneca

September 24, 2026Sep 24, 2026

This article is sponsored by AstraZeneca. As a medical professional and oncologist, personalized and compassionate care has been a core pillar of my approach. I learned early in my medical training how important understanding the whole patient can be to…

This article is sponsored by AstraZeneca.

As a medical professional and oncologist, personalized and compassionate care has been a core pillar of my approach. I learned early in my medical training how important understanding the whole patient can be to best support people facing cancer, especially when it comes to potential treatment options and health-related quality of life.

Outside the clinic, I also have first-hand experience of what a cancer diagnosis …

Physician

Observation status is a clinical choice, not a billing one

Chinyelu E. Oraedu, MD

September 24, 2026Sep 24, 2026

One night, during cross coverage with residents, I was called to provide clinical oversight for a frail older woman admitted from the emergency department. She had multiple comorbidities and a deteriorating clinical picture, but she had been placed under observation…

When I asked residents why observation was so often selected, the answer was usually some version of this: “It is easier to change the patient to inpatient …

Health Policy

Kratom bans confuse the leaf with a semisynthetic opioid

Heidi Sykora, DNP

September 24, 2026Sep 24, 2026

Consider what happened in Walker County, Georgia, in the fall of 2025. Multiple middle schoolers became ill after eating gummies at school, though even the eventual headcount was never fully settled, with local reports ranging from three to five students. Emergency room physicians diagnosed a kratom overdose based on the clinical picture, and within hours the story was national: Kratom gummies had hospitalized children. Investigators collected one of the gummies …

Patient

What anxiety feels like while reaching for hope again

Michele Luckenbaugh

September 24, 2026Sep 24, 2026

I look toward the darkening sky As evening begins to gather, Layers of pale blue, soft gray, And rose spilling across the horizon, Colors so gentle They seem to beg me, Set it down. Set aside the fear that has…

I look toward the darkening sky
As evening begins to gather,
Layers of pale blue, soft gray,
And rose spilling across the horizon,
Colors so gentle
They seem to beg me,

Set it down.

Set aside the fear that has wrapped itself
Around me like a python,
Tightening its grip
Until even my heart forgets
How to breathe.

Fear is an evil thing
When it takes up residence
Inside the mind.

It comes in the waking hours
Without invitation,
Turning ordinary thoughts into daggers,
Each one sharpened against …

Patient

Stigmatizing language in medical records harms care

Monica McEathron

September 24, 2026Sep 24, 2026

I have never asked medicine to promise me a cure. I have asked it to help me stay alive long enough to come home to my children. My medical record is not subtle. Recurrent pancreatitis led to sepsis and multi-organ…

I have never asked medicine to promise me a cure. I have asked it to help me stay alive long enough to come home to my children.

My medical record is not subtle. Recurrent pancreatitis led to sepsis and multi-organ failure in 2016, a Whipple procedure in 2017, and a total pancreatectomy in 2021. I now have no functioning pancreas, insulin-deficient type 3c diabetes, severely altered gastrointestinal anatomy, and an inability …

Real physician voices, twice a week

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