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Nationally recognized psychiatrist, internist, and addiction medicine specialist Muhamad Aly Rifai discusses his article “Physician legal rights: What to do when agents knock.” Muhamad shares a terrifying but essential guide for any …
As a longtime writer and health care educator, I am sometimes approached by media reporters to discuss multiple fields. Despite the breadth of my publications in U.S. and Canadian health care, my original academic degrees (45 years ago) were in engineering subjects. Among my other hobbies, I have at times contributed as a peer reviewer in advanced science and technology journals.
Thus, it came as no surprise when I received the …
We are currently living through the greatest democratization of health information in history. You no longer need a library card or a medical degree to learn about physiology, nutrition, or disease prevention. We carry the world’s medical knowledge in our pockets, accessible with a single tap.
On the surface, this is a victory for public health. People are more aware of the importance of sleep, the risks of processed foods, and …
Elevance Health recently reported that it expects to lose more than 180,000 fully insured group plan enrollees in 2026, with its CFO describing the strategy as “prioritizing disciplined pricing and margin integrity over volume.” UnitedHealth has made similar statements. Both are effectively walking away from the fully insured employer market, where administrative complexity no longer justifies the economics.
At the same time, private equity is pouring capital into …
This is the fifth New Year since the onset of COVID-19 in America. I am a pulmonary and critical care physician who had spent a decade of my life working in ICUs before I became an ICU patient myself in 2025. As a physician, husband, and father of four young children, I had been saving others. But this year, I needed to be saved.
Transitions are times for introspection. How do …
Dr. Andrea Love wrote about the lack of basic scientific knowledge among the public, noting that only about 28 percent of people possess it. She highlighted the consequences of this, emphasizing how it can negatively affect people’s decisions and lives.
Many of the articles I have written have dealt with scientific knowledge in one form or another. My comments on the FDA and drug approvals, Alzheimer’s and cancer screening blood tests, …
In 1983, The Outsiders featured Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and, augmented by Francis Ford Coppola’s cinematic genius, it planted a seed, one I was unaware of at the time.
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can …
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Fertility specialist and founder of Montgomery Fertility Center Oluyemisi (Yemi) Famuyiwa discusses her article “Infertility public health: the WHO’s new global guideline.” Oluyemisi examines the historic release of global guidelines that reframe …
Many OB-GYNs find their views on perimenopause and menopause change once they experience these transitions themselves. Even with medical training, the symptoms can be surprising and harder to recognize than expected.
As women’s health clinicians, we understand the common challenges of this stage of life. Hot flashes, sleep problems, vaginal dryness, mood changes, weight gain, and trouble concentrating can affect daily routines in ways that many women do not expect. When …
For the past few weeks, I’ve been rotating through pediatrics. In the emergency room, I met a little boy I’ll call Ian.
Ian was wary of everyone who came close to him, especially anyone holding a stethoscope or thermometer. Sometimes all it took was the way you raised your hand, or a glance toward his neck, for him to retreat behind invisible walls. He was only about a year and a …
When Anne-Sophie Mutter appeared under the lights in Taipei to play John Williams, the audience was already aging with her. That is not a tragedy; it is a form of wisdom. In a super-aged society, an evening at the concert hall is not only entertainment; it is an anatomy lesson in movement, meaning, and care.
Tempo and governance
The program opened with “Sound the Bells!” The brass did not summon cinematic sentiment; …
You know the real flex in life is to be able to stretch out like a cat on a random Tuesday and not worry about bills or appointments or being anywhere.
I think there’s something truly to be said about time freedom (and not only time freedom, but freedom of self) where we can let go of the guilt and shame and all these things that hustle culture has ingrained in …
House lawmakers recently passed a health care bill that grabbed headlines for what it excluded: a solution to the looming expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits. But largely overlooked inside the bill was a provision that did make it through, a long-requested provision toward creating stronger federal legislation directly targeting pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the middlemen who increasingly determine what Americans pay for their medications. These rules …
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You don’t learn this in medical school: Clinical familiarity creates attachment.
Not the kind we mean in romance. Not even the kind we mean in psychotherapy. Something quieter and more automatic, built through repetition and stakes.
You don’t have to say anything deeply personal for it to happen.
You just have to show up again. And again. And again.
Same hallway turns. Same waiting room chairs. Same voice calling your name. Same pace in …
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Internal medicine physician Earl Stewart, Jr. discusses his article “Pancreatic cancer racial disparities.” Earl examines the devastating pattern of pancreatic cancer claiming Black cultural icons like John Lewis and Aretha Franklin while …
Once a year,
I return to two quiet organs
I once carried without thought,
working faithfully in the dark,
asking for nothing,
until one day they asked to be seen.
Cysts.
Small moons of fluid,
bubbles scattered like careless stars
throughout the geography of me.
Harmless, they said.
Mostly.
Until one was not.
That year,
a word entered my body:
cancer.
A word that knows how to make itself at home
in every corner of thought.
A specialist explained
how light and force could be aimed,
how the invader could …
I’ve spent more than 30 years in nursing, and in recent years my work has shifted to something most people never think about: clinical data abstraction. My job is to review the medical record and extract the pieces of information that clinical registries rely on for research, quality reporting, regulatory requirements, and everyday decision-making. It’s specialized work that depends on clinical judgment, a deep understanding of clinical documentation in the …
Most physicians begin their careers with a deeply held belief: If treatment is good, patients will come. It feels intuitively correct, and early in practice it often appears to be true. Clinical outcomes build trust, trust brings patients, and for a time the system seems to sustain itself. Yet after years of working inside physician-owned hospitals, group practices, and large corporate health systems, I have learned an uncomfortable truth. Good …
The emergency department didn’t suddenly get worse.
The numbers did.
Every shift, emergency clinicians are measured by dashboards that insist on telling a familiar story: Door-to-provider times are too long, length of stay is unacceptable, left-without-being-seen rates are creeping up. The implication is clear. We’re slow. We’re inefficient. We’re failing.
But those numbers are no longer describing clinical performance. They’re describing system saturation.
Emergency departments today operate in conditions that were once considered temporary …
Hashimoto’s disease is the most common cause of hypothyroidism in children and adolescents, yet it remains frequently overlooked, particularly in adolescent girls. Fatigue, mood changes, weight gain, and cognitive slowing are often attributed to mental health conditions or dismissed as normal features of puberty, delaying diagnosis and treatment. This pattern reflects a broader failure to recognize how autoimmune thyroid disease presents during adolescence, and how gendered assumptions shape clinical interpretation …
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