Extreme longevity
People claim they want to live to be 100, yet is that a good thing? How you get there may make all the difference. Here’s my take on Blue Zones and the prospect of living to 100. “Blue Zone” is a nonscientific term popularized twenty years ago by Dan Buettner, a National Geographic explorer who studied five geographic regions where many people live to be over ninety or 100. …
Who wants to live to be a hundred?
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Internal medicine physician Rajeev Khanna discusses his article, “I passed my medical boards at 63. And no, I was not having a midlife crisis.” He shares his journey of studying for the …
Passing the medical boards at age 63 [PODCAST]
As a founder developing AI systems for mental health support, I have wrestled with a fundamental question: How do we use AI to expand access while maintaining patient-provider trust? Building an AI Mental Health Copilot has shown me that the ethical challenges are as complex as the technical ones, and far more consequential. The mental health crisis demands innovation. AI copilots offer scalable, always-available support to bridge care gaps caused …
Ethical AI in mental health: 6 key lessons
During the pandemic lockdown I felt lonely and cut off from the usual fun and games with friends and family. I spent far too much time inside my own head, reading and thinking, but starving for the simple nourishment of play. When restrictions eased, all I wanted was to wag my tail at other people and invite them to a game of catch. Esoteric intellectual play can be rewarding, but …
The simple wellness hack of playing catch
I didn’t understand why, especially since I had just spoken with him before his travels. The day my son’s father, Joseph, died, I was sitting in a nail salon. A friend from the military called, offering condolences. I didn’t understand why; until I checked social media and saw the news of an airplane crash. My heart knew before my mind could process it.
Six years later, same month, just five days …
Grief and leadership in health care
Psychiatrists know what it feels like to practice in a field questioned at every turn. From the earliest days of our specialty, we have faced doubts not only from the public but also from our own colleagues in medicine. The very existence of conditions such as schizophrenia, melancholic depression, bipolar disorder, or attention-deficit disorder has been challenged repeatedly. We have heard the claims: It’s just weakness. It’s a vitamin deficiency. …
What psychiatry can teach all doctors
Physicians hold one of the most essential and sacred trusts in every society: the care of human life. Yet across many developed nations, this trust is undermined by a growing culture of suspicion, litigation, sensationalism, and retaliation. When unethical malpractice lawyers hunt for profit, unfair regulators overreach with bureaucratic zeal, unprofessional journalists publish half-truths for headlines, or disgruntled patients weaponize complaints, the damage goes far beyond the doctor’s reputation. The …
How undermining physicians harms society
In a major advance in medicine, a man with type 1 diabetes is making his own insulin again, this time using genetically engineered donor islet cells. Researchers provided the new cells with an invisibility cloak to allow them to escape immune detection. After three months of follow-up, his body had not only accepted the new tissue but was quietly producing insulin. This single-patient proof-of-concept study gives hope to the millions …
CRISPR therapy offers hope for diabetes
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Neurologist Ray Dorsey discusses the article “Expanding the Parkinson’s universe of care for patients, caregivers, clinicians, and communities.” In this episode, Ray reimagines Parkinson’s care through a cosmic analogy, with patients as …
Expanding Parkinson’s care: a new universe for patients, caregivers, and clinicians [PODCAST]
In 1995, I stood at the edge of a map most policymakers ignored: Appalachian Ohio. The Surgeon General’s 2002 report, “Closing the Gap: A National Blueprint to Improve the Health of Persons with Mental Retardation,” would later cite our work as a model for rural specialty outreach. But long before that recognition, we were ledgering care into counties where children with developmental disabilities had no clear path to diagnosis, let …
How health disparities affect children
A recent Washington Post article called for earlier detection of atherosclerosis and a shift from “ischemia-centric” thinking to an “atheroma-centric” model. That’s progress, but it’s still missing the most important piece: Plaque isn’t the root cause.
For 50 years, we’ve built a trillion-dollar cardiology machine around the cholesterol hypothesis. Statins, PCSK9 inhibitors, ezetimibe, inclisiran, Lp(a) drugs, all circling the same biochemical drain. LDL plays a role, yes. But LDL is …
Rethinking cholesterol and atherosclerosis
HBO’s The Pitt collected thirteen Primetime Emmy nominations this year, winning both Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for Noah Wyle. But the recognition was not just for great television. The series struck a cultural nerve because it captured something raw and real: the emotional side of medicine. Viewers saw the chaos of an emergency room after a mass casualty event, the head physician …
Why doctors need emotional skills to survive
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Physician and coach Jessie Mahoney discusses her article “Stepping down in medicine is an evolution.” In this episode, Jessie challenges the cultural belief that stepping down from medical roles is a sign …
Stepping down in medicine: Why letting go can be an act of leadership [PODCAST]
Students have been sharing with me their reasons for deciding to pursue a career in internal medicine, a fitting topic for this year’s upcoming Internal Medicine Day. The most moving stories are those describing them seeing the person behind …
Celebrating internal medicine through our human connections with patients
As a research scientist who is devoted to ensuring that immigrant nurses have successful U.S. careers, the issue of internationally educated nurses’ (IENs’) cross-culture language competence has recently been both a sensitive and front-and-center issue pervading my work. In my more than 30 years in the health care sphere, the topic is now reaching a fever-pitch as IENs increasingly enter the U.S. health care workforce and play a critical role …
The debate on English tests for immigrant nurses
The Federally Qualified Health Center stands as perhaps the most eloquent institutional response to the perennial tension between medicine as market commodity and medicine as moral imperative. In the concrete reality of the FQHC (with its sliding-fee scales, its community governance structures, and its legislative mandate to serve the underserved) we find materialized those aspirations that have animated medical ethics since the Hippocratic tradition: that healing should flow toward need …
The FQHC model and medicine’s moral promise
Into this psychological wasteland, we’re now introducing AI companions as the solution. Meta’s personas, Character.AI’s virtual friends, and romantic chatbots; the market for artificial intimacy is exploding. The promise is seductive: connection without risk, companionship without effort, and validation on demand.
But here’s what these AI relationships actually do: They allow users to avoid the very challenges that build psychological resilience. Genuine relationships require vulnerability, the ability to tolerate conflict, and …
At age 81, I speak and write voluminously as a health care educator specializing in public health policy and practice for the treatment of pain and addiction. My wife and I are also careful about getting our periodic vaccinations for flu and COVID-19. A few days ago we responded to an invitation from our pharmacy to drop in for our shots on a walk-in basis. The process turned out to …
The frustrating bureaucracy of getting a vaccine
I define a frivolous medical malpractice lawsuit as being caused by a random error of nature.
Plaintiffs are entitled to feel aggrieved and to seek legal counsel. Some, however, have ulterior motives.
Plaintiff attorneys are “good Samaritans.” They work for a contingency fee. This invites ulterior motives; however, because these attorneys bear the cost, motives do not matter. Only the value of a case matters and there is artificial intelligence to weed …
Who profits from medical malpractice lawsuits?
The pandemic changed us in ways that cannot be measured by infection rates alone. Beyond the physical toll, it left lasting scars on our mental health. Fear, uncertainty, and isolation became daily realities. As a health professional and researcher, I wanted to understand how people could begin to heal. During my doctoral work, I studied adults who engaged in different wellness practices after the pandemic. Some found relief in nature: …
Healing from the pandemic’s mental toll
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