Youth online gambling is the new opioid crisis

Conditions and Diseases
June 2, 2026

Gen X (roughly 1965 to 1980) grew up as “latchkey kids” with no constant internet, more independence, figuring things out through trial and error. They often developed real resilience from facing hardships without much handholding. Gen Z (1997 to 2012) entered a world saturated with technology, social media, instant information, and a big emphasis on mental health. Many are thoughtful about emotional well-being but can be less practiced …

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Youth online gambling is the new opioid crisis

Heparin for acute coronary syndrome: a closer look

Medications
June 2, 2026

Last week, KevinMD published my blog titled “The anticoagulant standard of care nobody tested.” This week I’ll continue with a discussion of patients who may have been harmed by anticoagulants.

In 2001, two co-authors and I initiated a systematic review of “Anticoagulants versus non-steroidal anti-inflammatories or placebo for treatment of venous thromboembolism.” The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews delayed publishing it until 2006. Because of the delays, Medscape General …

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Heparin for acute coronary syndrome: a closer look

MAHA has the right diagnosis and the wrong treatment plan [PODCAST]

Podcast
June 1, 2026
YouTube video

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

The same Robert Kennedy Jr. who sued Monsanto over glyphosate in 2017 is now defending an order to expand its production. What does a functional medicine physician do with that? Shiv K. Goel, …

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MAHA has the right diagnosis and the wrong treatment plan [PODCAST]

The hidden causes of heart attacks in young adults

Conditions and Diseases
June 1, 2026

A 32-year-old male is rushed to the ER. An hour ago, he was playing football with his friends, as he does every week. No smoking. Barely drinks. No family history anyone knew about. He is 32 years old, and his heart is attacking him. He is not an anomaly anymore. He is a pattern. According to an extensive study spanning 16 years, the rate of having a heart attack …

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The hidden causes of heart attacks in young adults

Pregnant resident discrimination nearly cost me everything

Physician
June 1, 2026

I have delivered hundreds of babies. I have held the hands of women in their most terrifying and most joyful moments. I have spent my entire adult life becoming the kind of doctor who shows up, completely, compassionately, and without hesitation, for my patients. What I never imagined was that one day, bleeding and pregnant and alone in a call room at 21 weeks, I would be the one who …

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Pregnant resident discrimination nearly cost me everything

Trust in medicine is restored by method, not empathy

Physician
June 1, 2026

Trust is often discussed in medicine as if it were mainly personal. Did the patient trust the clinician? Was the clinician empathetic? Did communication feel respectful? Did the patient feel heard? All of that matters. But it does not fully explain why trust breaks down in modern care.

Patients do not lose trust only when a clinician is rude, dismissive, or wrong. They lose trust when they leave an encounter without …

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Trust in medicine is restored by method, not empathy

Why juries struggle with medical malpractice cases

Physician
June 1, 2026

In a Philadelphia courtroom this spring, a malpractice verdict unraveled in real time. A juror stood up during the reading of the verdict and said to the judge, “I think I misunderstood your question.” Moments later, when asked again if she agreed, she answered, “No, I do not.” What followed was confusion, re-polling, shifting answers, and ultimately a legally valid but deeply disturbing conclusion: The defendant physician was partly negligent, …

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Why juries struggle with medical malpractice cases

Health care worker burnout doesn’t end at retirement

Conditions and Diseases
June 1, 2026

The dream is always the same.

I’m pushing the ultrasound machine down a hospital hallway with an X-ray tech beside me. We’re on our way to do a portable exam when a voice crackles overhead: “Radiology to the ER. STAT.” She peels away toward the emergency department, and I turn back toward imaging alone. Then I can’t find my way back.

I step into elevators that open onto unfamiliar floors. I push …

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Health care worker burnout doesn’t end at retirement

Why HIPAA settlements hit independent practices

Physician Finance
June 1, 2026

Most independent practices treat HIPAA as a documentation exercise. The policy binder sits on a shelf, the privacy notice is posted, the staff training certificate is in the file, and the assumption is that the practice is covered. Enforcement patterns over the last several years suggest a different exposure model. The settlements that reach small practices are rarely about the policies that were missing on paper. They are about the …

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Why HIPAA settlements hit independent practices

5 ways drug ads mislead patients on TV

Medications
June 1, 2026

I have written a couple of previous articles regarding pharmaceutical advertisements on TV and in print. I noted that they used glitz to sell their products, and that this was not helpful for patients, especially as many new products had potentially more severe side effects than older ones and were often of no greater effectiveness. The only significant difference was that newer products were more expensive.

The safety issue is of …

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5 ways drug ads mislead patients on TV

ICU nursing did not return to normal after COVID

Conditions and Diseases
May 31, 2026

I still hear my ventilator alarms in my sleep. But what stays with me is the silence.

For a long time, our ICU felt sealed off. No families. No clergy. No one at the bedside except us. When someone was dying at 2 a.m., it was machines, medication drips, and a screen propped up so a family could say goodbye from somewhere else.

We filled in the gaps. We had to. We …

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ICU nursing did not return to normal after COVID

The Goldwater Rule and the cost of psychiatric silence

Conditions and Diseases
May 31, 2026

When the American Psychiatric Association formalized Section 7.3 of its Principles of Medical Ethics in 1973, it acted with a clear sense of urgency. Nine years earlier, the psychiatric profession had profoundly embarrassed itself in a partisan poll published by Fact magazine, where 1,189 psychiatrists, without any clinical examinations, labeled Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater “psychologically unfit.” The diagnoses were sloppy, weaponized, and defamatory.

The decayed fortress of silence

In response, the …

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The Goldwater Rule and the cost of psychiatric silence

A letter to my future self, the team physician

Medical Education
May 31, 2026

As a former Team USA figure skater with my own Olympic dreams, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own experience as an elite athlete while watching the Winter Olympics this year. With Match Day behind me and medical school graduation approaching, it is also time to dream of the future again.

In March, I matched into orthopedic surgery for residency, and I hope to complete a sports medicine fellowship to …

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A letter to my future self, the team physician

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Peptide regulation: 4 lanes every physician must know

Medications
May 31, 2026

If you work in medicine long enough, you learn that science moves slowly. Regulation moves slower. And social media moves at the speed of caffeine and bad decisions. That collision is exactly what is happening right now in the peptide world.

One week the FDA tightens restrictions. The next week state medical boards issue warnings. Then telehealth companies pivot. Then compounding pharmacies change formulations. Then another peptide disappears from the market. …

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Peptide regulation: 4 lanes every physician must know

What AI in medicine can and cannot do

Health Technology
May 31, 2026

The announcement landed the way tech announcements usually do: bold claims, a glossy render, the implication that health care’s problems are basically engineering problems that nobody competent had gotten around to solving.

Elon Musk envisions Optimus, his humanoid AI robot, stepping into medical care. Surgical precision. Universal access. Automation of the tasks that slow medicine down. He has gone so far as to claim Optimus could one day perform “any medical …

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What AI in medicine can and cannot do

Why physicians need to learn cannabis medicine now

Medications
May 31, 2026

I am a geriatrics and hospice and palliative medicine physician with over 20 years of experience. Over the years, I have seen how cannabis has helped my patients, and I am very comfortable with my patients using cannabis.

But like many physicians, I was not formally trained in cannabis medicine. In fact, for the longest time I thought people smoked the leaves. It was only much later that I learned that …

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Why physicians need to learn cannabis medicine now

I built clinical decision-support tools at the bedside

Health Technology
May 31, 2026

For most of my career I was an unlikely candidate to build software. I am a consultant cardiac anesthesiologist. My world was the operating room, the bypass machine, the bleeding patient, the next case.

What changed wasn’t ambition. It was a quiet realization: Life had become loud and fast, and I no longer had time to sit down, open a textbook, and read the way I once did. And I started …

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I built clinical decision-support tools at the bedside

GLP-1s and neurotech are colliding over chronic pain

Conditions and Diseases
May 31, 2026

Fifty million Americans wake up in chronic pain every day. Not soreness. Not the dull ache of a hard week. Pain that has dismantled careers, ended marriages, and driven people, my patients, over 25 years, to suicide, overdose, and a slow erasure of self. I trained at USC and UCLA, spent three decades in interventional pain management, and I can tell you with clinical certainty: the system we built to …

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GLP-1s and neurotech are colliding over chronic pain

Physician contract review is about what is missing

Conditions and Diseases
May 31, 2026

She had already signed the lease.

A friend of ours, a hospitalist, had accepted an attending position in the Chicago area. The contract stated she could be assigned to work at any of the practice’s contracted hospitals. She read it carefully. She asked which hospital she’d be based at. They told her. She found an apartment nearby, signed a lease, and started planning her life around a commute she could live …

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Physician contract review is about what is missing

Violence against doctors: 5 forces that ignite it

Physician
May 30, 2026

You might recall the 2002 film John Q., in which a desperate father takes a hospital emergency room hostage because his insurance company refuses to cover his son’s heart transplant. It is a gut-wrenching depiction of medical rage. But now looking back at that scenario from the vantage point of 2026, the moral direction of that anger feels fundamentally different from what physicians face today. John Q. was furious at …

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Violence against doctors: 5 forces that ignite it

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