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Coping with a childhood type 1 diabetes diagnosis

Conditions

April 14, 2026

An excerpt from Confessions of a Problem Seeker: My Lifetime Journey From Busy Brain To Loving Heart.

In his own intuitive way, with only a second-grade education, my dad knew something was not right. Just hours after peeing in a paper cup at our pediatrician’s office, the doctor called my mom at my father’s butcher shop to inform her I had juvenile diabetes (now referred to as type 1 diabetes). …

The ROI of ambient AI in health care and autonomous coding

Pat Williams

Tech

April 14, 2026

When ambient listening and generative AI first entered the clinical mainstream, the value proposition was simple: Reduce documentation burden and give clinicians their evenings back. That promise resonated. Burnout was rising. After-hours charting had become normalized. Health systems needed relief. And ambient documentation delivered.

But as deployments scaled from pilot projects to enterprise rollouts, the conversation matured. CFOs and revenue cycle leaders began asking a harder question: Beyond time savings, what …

Artificial intelligence is changing medical writing today

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Tech

April 14, 2026

The moment was small, almost trivial. I handed my daughter her polished curriculum vitae (CV), clear, structured, and professionally phrased. All the information had been distilled and reorganized from her resume. She looked at it for a second longer than expected, then asked a single question: “ChatGPT?” I said yes, and felt an unexpected flicker of shame. Not because I had done something wrong. Not because I had tried to …

A humorous parody of medical specialties and the modern patient

Sidney J. Winawer, MD

Physician

April 14, 2026

Prologue

As a practicing gastroenterologist for more than 50 years, now emeritus, I was privileged to have had colleagues with expertise in many specialties to whom I could refer patients. Since my career began, the constellation of these specialists has increased considerably. Patients often find themselves moving from one “ologist” to another, each very skilled but focused on a particular organ system. From the patient’s perspective, maneuvering through the complexities of …

Managing food allergy anxiety through diagnostic testing

Tamara Hubbard and Gary Falcetano

Conditions

April 14, 2026

Food allergies affect roughly 8 to 10 percent of U.S. children and adults, and prevalence has risen steadily over the past two decades. Beyond the impacts on physical health, families managing food allergies experience persistent stress and vigilance preparing for unknown risks, whether it’s label reading, preparing for school, or going to restaurants or social gatherings. Seasonal allergies, in particular, have also been linked to generalized …

How generative AI in health care is changing patient expectations

Cybil Sierra Stingl, MD and Robert M. Kaplan, PhD

Tech

April 14, 2026

On a busy call shift as a resident doctor at Stanford, I have heard versions of the same sentence more than once: “That’s reassuring. ChatGPT said the same thing.” In clinic, patients increasingly admit they left visits hesitant to ask clarifying questions, then turned to a generative AI tool to explain their diagnosis in plainer language. Some return reassured; others come back more uncertain. But the pattern is unmistakable. Patients …

Oral Wegovy sounds easy, but the reality is more complicated [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

April 13, 2026

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

Is the new oral Wegovy pill a breakthrough or a risk most patients never hear about? Shiv K. Goel, an internal medicine and functional medicine physician, joins the show to unpack his KevinMD …

Surviving a hospital blizzard as a physician on call

George F. Smith, MD

Physician

April 13, 2026

The recent record snowstorm in New England got me all in a deep wintery nostalgia. I contacted my friends back in Boston who have been living there for well over 40 years to get their perspectives, and it brought back memories of living on the East Coast and surviving the seemingly interminable long winters there before I moved to California in the late 1980s. Most prominently in my memory is …

Knee replacement marketing undermines informed consent

Cory Calendine, MD

Conditions

April 13, 2026

She came in having done the work. She had watched the clinic videos. Read the website. She knew the name of the proprietary technique for knee replacement that the surgeon’s practice was advertising. She used it correctly in the first sentence of our consultation. What she could not tell me was what the approach actually did differently, which structures it spared, or why it might matter for her specific anatomy …

Pharmacy closures threaten our entire public health system

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Physician

April 13, 2026

We turned pharmacies into the backbone of public health during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Then we went back to paying them like retail stores. The result is what I think of as the pharmacy paradox. We expanded their role without changing the economics that sustain them. Now, across the country, those same pharmacies are closing, quietly and disproportionately in the communities that need them most.

In 2021, the corner drugstore ceased …

Pathogenesis of a medical startup: a physician’s diary of daring, doubting, and doing it anyway

Maxim Saksonov, MD, MBA

Physician

April 13, 2026

Intro

This is not a story of a 28-year-old successful serial entrepreneur, nor a work of personal development literature. It is rather an auto-dissection of a very regular and tired doctor who was arrogant enough to co-found a medical startup and become its chief executive officer (CEO) without having any qualifications for it whatsoever.

It is also not a story of great success (yet) merely because the journey is in its diapers …

The existential crisis of aging in medicine

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

April 13, 2026

We enter the cathedral of medicine with a specific architecture of the soul: high ambition, perfectionism fueled by a productive neuroticism, and a boundless capacity for self-sacrifice. For many of us, the “best years” (the physical and cognitive prime of our 20s and 30s) are traded for the fluorescent hum of the wards and the weight of six-figure debts. This financial burden does more than strain the bank account; it …

Rethinking the role of family physicians vs. specialists

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

April 13, 2026

Calls to declare family physicians the “backbone of health care” are emotionally appealing, but they do not withstand scrutiny. When we examine training pathways, cost structures, insurer incentives, and real-world performance, a different picture emerges, one in which many other clinicians are better trained for the populations they serve and, critically for insurers, far cheaper. This is not an attack on family physicians. It is a call for accuracy in …

Health care investing demands thorough clinical diligence

Harsha Moole, MD

Finance

April 12, 2026

Your hospital recently adopted a new piece of technology. Maybe it was an electronic health record (EHR) module. A patient monitoring upgrade. A documentation tool. A new device in the operating room (OR). Think about what happened next. Some of your colleagues embraced it. Others resisted. The nurses figured out workarounds within a week. The information technology (IT) department sent three emails about training sessions that nobody attended. Six months …

Administrative burden is driving severe physician burnout

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Physician

April 12, 2026

You trained for years to become a physician so you could heal people. Yet every day, you find yourself fighting the very system that is supposed to support you. A patient presents with classic symptoms warranting a specific imaging study, medication, or procedure. You know what they need. The evidence is clear. But instead of moving forward with care, you are forced into a gauntlet of prior authorizations, peer-to-peer reviews, …

Patient ownership is the key to a better health care system

Steven E. Warren, MD, DPA

Physician

April 12, 2026

I have practiced medicine for 45 years. In that time I have learned that the biggest threat to a patient is not a missed diagnosis. It is a missed owner. Every patient has a story. Most of them have a complicated one. Multiple doctors, multiple medications, multiple specialists, multiple systems. And in all of that complexity, nobody steps forward and says: I own this patient. I will follow the thread …

Lung cancer in nonsmokers: a hidden health disparity

Alice S. Y. Lee, MD

Conditions

April 12, 2026

May is AANHPI Month. As we celebrate the heritage, resilience, and contributions of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities, I also think of a poorly recognized health disparity within our community: lung cancer disproportionately affecting women who have never smoked. I was one of these women. Exactly five years ago in May 2021, I underwent major thoracic lung surgery that literally saved my life. The shocking diagnosis made …

Make America Healthy Again fails true functional medicine

Shiv K. Goel, MD

Physician

April 12, 2026

I grew up in a family of nine in New Delhi, where scarcity was our daily companion. We had no processed food, no artificial dyes, no glyphosate-laced cereal aisles stretching into infinity. We ate whole foods, not by philosophy, but by necessity. We moved our bodies, not by gym membership, but because life demanded it. We slept when the sun went down and woke when it rose. Circadian rhythm was …

Expert witness credibility is destroyed by AI opinions

Tracy Liberatore, Esq, PA

Tech

April 12, 2026

There is a conversation happening in the medical-legal space right now, and most clinicians doing expert witness work are not part of it. It is about artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically about whether AI belongs anywhere near an expert witness report. I want to weigh in. Not as a technology enthusiast and not as a skeptic. As someone who has spent a decade as a practicing physician assistant, earned a law …

How health care lobbying distorts the U.S. opioid crisis

Richard A. Lawhern, PhD

Policy

April 12, 2026

KevinMD recently published a paper describing the horrible impacts of health care lobbying in the U.S. This article assesses how effective the lobbyists have been in misdirecting four key legislators on health care-related committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

As we will shortly discover, these highly influential lawmakers have parts of their story right. They also have parts desperately wrong, in ways that are destroying American medicine …

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