KevinMD.com

July 31, 2026Jul 31, 2026

I hate how hard it is for doctors to get paid today. I know I'm not alone. I doubt there are any physicians or practice managers in the U.S. who feel like this current process of charting, coding, denials, quality…

I hate how hard it is for doctors to get paid today. I know I’m not alone. I doubt there are any physicians or practice managers in the U.S. who feel like this current process of charting, coding, denials, quality measurements, and clawbacks is working well.

It’s still worth saying out loud though: I hate it. You probably hate it, too. The whole “revenue cycle management” world that we’ve come …

Physician voices

Four years after Dobbs, the untold stories still matter

American Medical Women's Association

July 31, 2026Jul 31, 2026

Last month marked the fourth anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that fundamentally changed reproductive health care in the United States, returning many parts of the country to a reality that most practicing physicians…

Last month marked the fourth anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that fundamentally changed reproductive health care in the United States, returning many parts of the country to a reality that most practicing physicians and many patients had never experienced. Since then, access to reproductive health care and even routine pregnancy care, like miscarriage management, is based not on medical evidence or clinical judgment …

Physician voices

Administrative burden in primary care and the end of my career

Susan Bennett, MD

July 31, 2026Jul 31, 20265

Early in the morning of December 13, 2023, I dragged myself to the computer at my kitchen island after a terrible night of interrupted sleep. While I had experienced neck pain and stiffness for four months, it was much worse on that particular morning. I tried to prepare notes for my clinic scheduled later that day. Although I knew my patients well, …

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Conditions and diseases

Dental misinformation is now a patient-safety issue

Daria Buinevich, DDS

July 31, 2026Jul 31, 2026

A patient sees a short video promising to remove tartar at home. Another learns that bleeding gums can be "cured" with a particular oil. Someone with tooth pain orders a temporary filling kit online and postpones seeing a dentist because…

A patient sees a short video promising to remove tartar at home. Another learns that bleeding gums can be “cured” with a particular oil. Someone with tooth pain orders a temporary filling kit online and postpones seeing a dentist because the pain briefly improves. As a dentist, I have seen how quickly a confident online claim can influence a patient’s decisions. Often, the patient is not being careless. They are …

Physician voices

Why becoming a senior resident is so uncomfortable

Dr. Rupa Bhandari

July 31, 2026Jul 31, 2026

I don't know when things started taking the wrong turn. There are moments when words refuse to come, when they arrive after the moment they are needed, or sometimes do not arrive at all. It is not that I lack…

I don’t know when things started taking the wrong turn.

There are moments when words refuse to come, when they arrive after the moment they are needed, or sometimes do not arrive at all. It is not that I lack thoughts. I have them. Too many, sometimes. But when they are demanded in a precise moment, when someone expects an explanation, a response, a justification, my mind becomes strangely distant from …

Physician voices

Sexual misconduct in psychiatry taints every prescription

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

July 31, 2026Jul 31, 2026

A recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer described a female psychiatrist whose license was revoked after the state medical board found that she had a years-long sexual relationship with a male patient she began treating at seventeen, while continuing to prescribe him a rotating regimen of up to twelve medications, including stimulants and benzodiazepines. The board also found that she prescribed medications to his mother and father, even …

Health technology

What AI in medicine still can’t replace

Michael P. Tabibian, MD

July 31, 2026Jul 31, 2026

Over the years I have seen this many times, as has any physician who has practiced long enough. Two patients come in with the same diagnosis, labs, pathology report, and treatment plan, whether managing a complex melanoma or a chronic…

We spend our training learning to explain the disease and the drug, and build almost nothing around explaining why individuals respond so differently to …

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What AI in medicine still can’t replace

Conditions and diseases

Family history in psychiatry: Ask why, not whether

Nebyou Belay, MD

July 31, 2026Jul 31, 2026

"My mother is bipolar. My brother has OCD. I'm sure this runs in the family." I hear some version of this in nearly every intake, and I understand why. Family history is a genuinely powerful tool in most of medicine.…

“My mother is bipolar. My brother has OCD. I’m sure this runs in the family.” I hear some version of this in nearly every intake, and I understand why. Family history is a genuinely powerful tool in most of medicine. It helps estimate genetic risk and sharpen diagnostic reasoning. In psychiatry, it’s often treated as carrying that same evidentiary weight. Too often, it doesn’t earn it.

Disease broadly falls into two …

Conditions and diseases

Workplace violence prevention is already your duty

Dr. Amanpreet Mann, MHA

July 31, 2026Jul 31, 2026

Early in my clinical training, I learned to read a room before I read a chart. You learn which patients are frightened, which families are about to come apart, and which moments are one wrong word away from becoming physical. What I didn’t learn, what almost none of us were taught, was that being hurt at work would come to feel like part of the job.

That normalization is the real …

The Podcast by KevinMD

Why your sinus infections keep coming back, and antibiotics may be the reason [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

July 30, 2026Jul 30, 2026

You keep getting sinus infections, so you keep getting antibiotics. What if the antibiotics are part of the problem? Franklyn R. Gergits is a board-certified otolaryngologist and fellowship-trained otolaryngic allergist with about 30 years in practice. This episode is based…

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Medical education

Sex education is for parents, not just kids

Catherine Chen

July 30, 2026Jul 30, 2026

"It's not just the kids, it's the parents." My sex education came in two forms: an abstinence jingle in middle school, and a sock on a banana in high school. My parents offered a third option: silence. Decades later, not…

“It’s not just the kids, it’s the parents.”

My sex education came in two forms: an abstinence jingle in middle school, and a sock on a banana in high school. My parents offered a third option: silence. Decades later, not only are individuals’ reproductive rights being stripped away, but reproductive health education in any form is threatened by the federal government at all levels, from elementary schools to medical residencies.

If we …

Conditions and diseases

The conflict of interest behind a cancer screening test

Frederic W. Grannis, Jr., MD

July 30, 2026Jul 30, 2026

The New York Times reported on June 5, 2026, that new research suggests molecular screening with a 14-protein panel can identify patients who will develop lung cancer in intervening years, allowing prescription of an interleukin-1 beta inhibitor drug (Ilaris) that may be capable of preventing lung cancer. This potentially important development, based upon a report in the journal Cell on the same date, is worthy of publication, but it fails …

Health technology

AI chatbot guardrails are strong only for suicide risk

Nicole Drapeau Gillen

July 30, 2026Jul 30, 2026

This week, I wrote here about a lawsuit involving a man with schizoaffective disorder whose use of ChatGPT spiraled into a months-long psychiatric crisis, and about a new clinical framework for understanding how AI can catalyze, amplify, co-author, or become the object of a patient’s delusions. That piece drew on a single, dramatic case. New research published this week suggests the underlying problem is systemic, not exceptional.

Researchers Annika Schoene and …

Conditions and diseases

Perimenopause misdiagnosis: what a normal lab result hides

Neil Panchal, DO

July 30, 2026Jul 30, 2026

"I just don't feel like myself lately." It is one of the most common opening lines in midlife primary care, and one of the least diagnostically useful on its face. The patient is forty-four, sleeping badly, irritable in a way…

“I just don’t feel like myself lately.”

It is one of the most common opening lines in midlife primary care, and one of the least diagnostically useful on its face. The patient is forty-four, sleeping badly, irritable in a way she describes as unfamiliar, and struggling to hold a thought through a meeting. Her cycles are still coming, roughly. She has read about perimenopause and dismissed the idea, because she …

Physician finance

Is institutional knowledge loss your staffing problem?

Karan Kanwar

July 30, 2026Jul 30, 2026

The best person at your front desk gives two weeks' notice on a Tuesday. It's nothing dramatic, just a better commute and a job that pays a little more. Everyone wishes her well, and the seat gets filled inside a…

The best person at your front desk gives two weeks’ notice on a Tuesday. It’s nothing dramatic, just a better commute and a job that pays a little more. Everyone wishes her well, and the seat gets filled inside a month.

What doesn’t get filled shows up in pieces over the following weeks. A patient lands in a slot that’s been blocked off for a year, because he gets anxious and …

Health policy

Medical frailty exemptions are the new prior authorization

Sameen Farooq, MD

July 30, 2026Jul 30, 2026

Every clinician can attest to the annoyance, stress, and worry that manifests when we think about paperwork. Even the likes of a snake oil salesman currently in charge of CMS, Dr. Oz, penned a piece noting this very real strain on physicians across the U.S. due to prior authorizations. Research has shown that physicians on average are spending up to 13 hours per week on this odious task and …

Conditions and diseases

Vitamin K refusal is a systems failure, not a parental one

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

July 30, 2026Jul 30, 2026

I trained in the era when newborn care was a choreography, not a ritual, not a preference, but a sequence built from epidemiology, autopsy reports, and the memories of children we could not save. In the nursery, two injections and…

Vitamin K IM: To prevent catastrophic late-onset vitamin K deficiency bleeding (VKDB)
Hib vaccine: To eliminate epiglottitis and

…

Health technology

When AI in claims review overcalls a valid claim

Carolline Chagas Moreira, MD

July 30, 2026Jul 30, 2026

A medical emergency call is never just a phone call. On the other side of the line, there may be chest pain, shortness of breath, trauma, fear, confusion, or a family member trying to describe symptoms without medical vocabulary. The first information is often incomplete. The situation may change within minutes. A decision has to be made quickly, but it cannot be made blindly.

In São Paulo, Brazil, where I work …

Conditions and diseases

When the DEA became my patient’s doctor

Bill Bauer, MD, PhD

July 30, 2026Jul 30, 2026

I have practiced neurology for more than fifty years. I have treated patients with refractory neuropathic pain, central pain syndromes, spinal cord injuries, and the cruel mix of conditions that fall under no clean diagnostic label. I have watched patients who were finally stable, finally sleeping, finally functioning, lose their prescriptions not because their physicians did anything wrong, but because the government decided that looking different on paper is the …

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When the DEA became my patient’s doctor

The Podcast by KevinMD

Big Pharma’s drug marketing got stealthy, and you are the target [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

July 29, 2026Jul 29, 2026

The pharma rep with the free lunch is gone. What replaced it is harder to see, and aimed at you and your doctor. Martha Rosenberg is an investigative reporter who has worked at two medical schools and two medical ad…

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