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The truth about short-term opioid prescribing and opioid use disorder

Conditions

March 23, 2026

In the thick of the opioid epidemic, there is this widespread fear called “opiophobia,” which basically means people, including patients and doctors, are scared to use opioids even when they are really needed for serious medical issues. This fear comes from the idea that even a short stint on opioids for acute pain, like after surgery, often leads to addiction or worse. John A. Bumpus’s 2025 review in ACS Pharmacology …

AI in health care: Why artificial intelligence cannot replace human empathy

Ryan McCarthy, MD

Physician

March 23, 2026

If you trust the titans of industry, and I do not, we are led to believe that, just around the proverbial corner, the equivalent of C-3PO will arrive to improve health care. How wonderful!

You might remember the fussy, shiny droid, the golden companion of R2-D2 in the Star Wars films. Fluent in over six million forms of communication, C-3PO bubbled with personality, …

AI bias in healthcare: When algorithms erase Black professionals

Seleipiri Akobo, MD, MPH, MBA

Physician

March 23, 2026

I was trying to be cool, so I recently joined a social media challenge with a simple prompt: “Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me.”

As a hospitalist, physician executive, and burnout architect, my digital footprint is deep. I talk about systemic health care reform, the psychology of exhaustion, and the structural “blueprints” needed to …

How spinal cord stimulation offers relief for chronic pain

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions

March 22, 2026

Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) continues to be a solid option for people dealing with chronic pain that just will not budge with the usual approaches like medications, physical therapy, or injections. It is a minimally invasive way to deliver low-level electrical pulses through electrodes placed in the epidural space near the spinal cord, helping to change how pain signals reach the brain and often providing relief in areas like the …

Compassion fatigue in medicine: Why the brain numbs trauma

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

March 22, 2026

In the sterile quiet of an exam room, a physician faces a patient recounting a history of profound trauma. To a layperson, the story is bone-chilling. To the seasoned clinician, it can occasionally and guiltily feel like data. We call it burnout or compassion fatigue, but biologically, it is something more fundamental. The human brain has a finite capacity for empathy.

Our neural circuitry evolved for small tribes, not for a …

The danger of detachment: How medical training reveals character

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

March 22, 2026

In 2016, Lauren Gambill wrote on KevinMD about being told, “She is not yours to grieve,” after a patient’s death. The message was clear: Grief was weakness, and physicians were expected to suppress it. Nearly a decade later, Arthur Lazarus argued that medical training does not change personality; it reveals scaffolding. He cited a “Blue Bloods” episode where Danny Reagan dismissed a racist watch leader and former cop with the …

The rhythm of healthy aging: Moving beyond health care metrics

Gerald Kuo

Conditions

March 22, 2026

Families often ask me what “healthy aging” really means. They expect actionable answers: target lab values, a 30-minute exercise prescription, or a strict dietary plan. In modern health care, we deliver these metrics with precision, yet our patients continue to struggle. That gap is not a failure of compliance. It is a failure of imagination. Recently, I found myself contemplating a different kind of prescription while attending a piano recital …

Managing acute heart failure: evidence from the DOSE trial

Benjamin P. Geisler, MD, Jeffrey L. Greenwald, MD, and Kathy May Tran, MD

Conditions

March 22, 2026

An excerpt from 50 Studies Every Hospitalist Should Know.

Debbie Lin Teodorescu, MD, MEng, a cardiologist, and Hugo Torres, MD, MPH, an endocrinologist, authored this article.

The DOSE trial provided good insight into the dosage and frequency for administering loop diuretics in patients presenting with acute decompensated heart failure. Physicians can prescribe intravenous loop diuretics with confidence that their decision is evidence-based, efficacious, and safe.

Research questions

Among patients with hemodynamically …

The clash between defensive medicine and value-based health care

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

Physician

March 22, 2026

Defensive medicine grows where fear rules. Value-based health care grows where judgment, trust, and outcomes matter. That is the clash now facing many doctors. On paper, health systems say they want high-value care, better outcomes, lower waste, and patient-centered decisions. In real life, many doctors practice in an environment shaped by needless complaints, crushing legal defense costs, underfunded services, regulator overreach, and instant reputational damage through online and social media. …

Cultural humility in medicine: Why respect matters as much as science

Kelly Dórea França

Education

March 22, 2026

What does it really mean to care for someone? I asked myself that question during my first months in medical school, when I realized that medicine was not only about science or protocols. It was about people, each one carrying their own culture, beliefs, and stories. And sometimes those stories mattered as much as the diagnosis itself.

One of my earliest experiences was with a woman from a rural community who …

Why physicians get stuck in productive and numbing cycles

Diane W. Shannon, MD, MPH

Physician

March 21, 2026

I had a mini epiphany recently. I realized there are three basic categories of time:

Productive: many work tasks (but not all), completing a task at home, achieving a specific personal or professional goal.
Non-productive and enriching: sleep, physical activity, being fully present with friends and family, learning something new.
Non-productive, non-enriching, and pleasurable: Netflix bingeing, drinking another glass of wine, zoning out, going down a social media rabbit hole, …
Read more…

Why physicians get stuck in productive and numbing cycles

A resident’s first surgery: When the patient teaches the doctor

Kaylan Baban, MD, MPH

Physician

March 21, 2026

“Dr. Baban? Dr. Baban?”

His slurred voice rasps across the room, weak but insistent, cutting through chiming monitors, buzzing fluorescent lights, and the screeching pager slung next to the empty gnaw in my stomach. I freeze where I stand, one hand scratching out post-operative orders on the last emergency surgery of the day, the other midway to the nursing station phone, grasping the silenced pager. My eyes sweep over the recovery …

What world leaders can learn from diverse medical teams

Zoran Naumovski, MD

Physician

March 21, 2026

I do not watch the news anymore. I do not listen to it on the radio. I do not even read about it online. But every once in a while, I will catch myself reading an article on Google News on my iPad. I, too, fall prey to clickbait on occasion. But, for the most part, I avoid the news: local, regional, state, national, and even international. It is too …

The controversy over Maintenance of Certification for grandfathered physicians

Bernard Leo Remakus, MD

Physician

March 21, 2026

I received a lifetime certification from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) in 1983. Since then, I have not participated in any of the Board’s “Maintenance of Certification” (MOC) programs.

I have taken the continuation of my medical education seriously, and have performed more than the number of hours required for my state licensure, professional liability insurability, and AMA continuing education recognition awards. Additionally, I have taught medical students and …

Criticism stings because doctors care deeply about their work [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

March 20, 2026

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

Pediatrician and certified coach Jessie Mahoney discusses her article “Dealing with physician negative feedback.” Jessie validates the pain that comes with criticism, noting that it hurts not because physicians are weak, but …

Why patient-centered care transforms chronic pain management

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Physician

March 20, 2026

The real magic in chronic pain care isn’t just the pills or the procedures, but it’s the connection between doctor and patient. When a physician shows genuine empathy and truly listens, patients feel seen, trust deepens, and outcomes improve in ways that often outshine standard treatments. Take this striking study: Among more than 1,400 people with chronic low back pain, those cared for by highly empathic doctors ended up with …

Beyond standard protocols: How translational science helps difficult IVF cases

Lina Gabriela Villar Muñoz, MD

Conditions

March 20, 2026

I have stood in that exam room more times than I care to admit, my hand lingering on the door handle, searching for a way to tell a patient that she has no viable embryos to transfer because her egg quality is poor. “Poor egg quality” is not a diagnosis but an observation, and one that leaves us uncertain whether the problem is intrinsic to the patient or a response …

Navigating your orthopedic surgery residency after Match Day

John E. Klibanoff, MD

Education

March 20, 2026

For students matching into orthopedic surgery, Match Day is both an achievement and an invitation. I matched 36 years ago. I still remember the anxiety of not knowing where on my list I would match. Orthopedic surgery was exclusive then. It still is. Recent analyses show that orthopedic surgery offered 916 residency positions across 218 programs in 2024, with a 74.3 percent match rate for U.S. allopathic seniors. That is …

Evidence-based medicine vs. clinical judgment: a medical student’s perspective

Jay Pendyala

Education

March 20, 2026

As a third-year medical student, I always carried three essentials during my emergency medicine clerkship: a stethoscope, a Celsius, and at my fingertips, MDCalc. With a few taps, I could translate uncertainty into structure: the Wells criteria for pulmonary embolism, NEXUS for cervical spine imaging, CAM for delirium, COWS for opioid withdrawal. These tools did not replace my clinical reasoning, but they scaffolded it. They allowed me to justify and …

How to manage a difficult patient and survive a high-conflict encounter

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

Physician

March 20, 2026

Every difficult patient is not dangerous. But every high-conflict encounter carries risk. Doctors like to think clinical skill will protect them: It will not. In modern practice, a physician can make a sound decision, communicate it poorly, and still walk into a complaint, a licensing problem, a lawsuit, or public reputational damage. That risk becomes even sharper in the care of chronic pain, substance misuse, insurance-driven visits, and patients whose …

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