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A federal agency recognized food allergy as a disability, then limited boarding protection to one allergen category. Lianne Mandelbaum, a leading advocate for airline safety measures to protect food-allergic passengers, returns to explain …
DOT ruling protects peanut allergies but not eggs, sesame, or milk [PODCAST]
A physician receives the letter. It is short, formal, and absolute. A complaint has been filed. An investigation is underway. In that moment, something shifts. Not just professionally, but personally. The identity built over years of training, sacrifice, and responsibility suddenly feels fragile. Every decision, every note, every outcome is now seen through a different lens. What follows is rarely discussed. Not in training. Not in hospital corridors. Not even …
How a medical investigation drives physician burnout
Independent physicians, particularly in rural communities, have spent years navigating a steady stream of financial cuts, rising costs, and policy instability. Over time, these pressures have forced difficult decisions: scaling back services, reducing staff, and in too many cases, closing care centers altogether.
While there has been modest, temporary relief through adjustments in the Physician Fee Schedule (PFS), it has not been enough to reverse the broader trend. Many practices remain …
How Medicare reimbursement hurts independent physicians
Patient care is getting squeezed. For years now, the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule has failed to give doctors the resources they need to keep up with rising costs and deliver high-quality care. The result is real strain on practices, especially smaller and independent ones, and growing risks for patients who rely on Medicare.
When you adjust for inflation, Medicare payment rates to physicians have dropped by about 33 percent …
Medicare physician pay has fallen 33 percent since 2001
A physician without LinkedIn in 2026 is making a business mistake, a reputation mistake, and a public health mistake.
This is no longer about keeping up with social media. It is about controlling your professional identity in a world where search results, AI summaries, recruiters, hospital leaders, journalists, patients, and even opponents look you up before they call you. LinkedIn reports more than 1.3 billion members worldwide. That makes it one …
LinkedIn for physicians is not optional in 2026
My daughter had been home sick for three days. Not the kind of sick that keeps you in bed, but the kind that lingers just enough to keep you home, well enough to be bored. She was restless, observant, and thinking. She is 10.
Her dad stayed home with her the first day. I took the second. By the third day, I went back to work. I arranged my schedule so …
How physician burnout impacts modern health care
One of the hardest parts of practicing psychiatry is that we still cannot reliably predict which medication will work for which patient.
A patient comes in struggling with depression. We choose a medication based on symptoms, history, side effect profile, family history, clinical experience, and sometimes educated guesswork. Then we wait. Sometimes the medication helps quickly. Sometimes it causes side effects. Sometimes nothing happens at all. Then we adjust, augment, switch, …
Precision psychiatry is finally catching up to medicine
Burnout among nurses and clinicians has been a prominent topic over the past decade. The combination of regulatory requirements, higher patient demands, and leaner budgets in the shadow of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has fueled the embers that have allowed this crisis of clinician burnout to smolder.
Simultaneously, health care systems are striving to deliver better clinical results in a world where transparency in data and public reporting is the expectation. …
How psychological safety reduces clinician burnout
I graduated residency with over 100 peer-reviewed publications, an EB-1A visa for extraordinary ability in medicine, and zero understanding of how health care capital works.
Nobody taught me what a term sheet was. Nobody explained how venture capital flowed into the companies building the devices, drugs, and software I used on patients every day. Nobody mentioned that the same analytical rigor I applied to systematic reviews, defining a question, evaluating evidence, …
Physicians belong in health care venture capital
Before treating a patient, you review their history, run diagnostics, and verify every detail. Have you done the same before trusting your financial advisor with your wealth?
Most medical professionals do not know if their advisor is truly acting in their best interest, or what they are really paying in fees, conflicts of interest, and hidden incentives.
I spent years working with financial advisors managing $20 million to more than $3 billion …
15 financial advisor questions for medical professionals
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What happens to your body and clinical judgment when you’re managing a code blue at the exact hour your biology demands deep sleep? Chinyelu E. Oraedu is an academic hospitalist and nocturnist with …
2 a.m. is a biological stress test no one talks about [PODCAST]
Spend enough time in a hospital, and patterns start to emerge. Not the clinical kind, the human kind. During my daughter’s recent hospitalization, residents rotated in and out every 12 hours. Over time, I found myself paying attention in a different way. Not with the intent to evaluate, but with a kind of quiet curiosity about how different people showed up in the same role, under the same conditions. It …
How medical residents build patient trust today
I have spent over two decades treating bariatric patients, and one of the most frustrating clinical situations I encounter is this: A patient sitting across from me who has done everything right. They are hitting 75 grams of protein a day. They are tracking every gram. They are bringing their food logs to every appointment. And they are still losing hair, losing muscle, and showing up with low labs.
In my …
How to improve protein absorption after gastric bypass
For much of my career, I understood my responsibility in familiar terms: care for the patient in front of me, advocate for better health systems, and teach the next generation of trainees. I still believe that. But I now believe something else just as strongly: If we are serious about health, we cannot stop at the clinic door. We also have to show up in civic life and in the …
How civic engagement empowers health care workers
The ECG was normal. The troponin was negative. The stress test was reassuring. Yet the patient in front of you looked as if he had been living under siege for months.
He was not sleeping. His blood pressure had worsened, despite medication adherence. He described chest tightness, reflux, headaches, irritability, and difficulty concentrating. He woke most nights around 3 a.m., his heart beating fast, checking an account balance, and then lay …
Why physicians miss business owner stress in patients
About half of the primary care visits I see these days involve patients that have consulted ChatGPT and have “an answer” to their medical symptoms that I need to debate, but that is just the beginning of what is coming to engulf all of health care in the near future. Working part-time for an Amazon One Medical clinic in Silicon Valley, I am seeing the rollout of artificial intelligence (AI) …
Artificial intelligence disrupts health care delivery
I was doing the dishes recently when I was hit with a stomach-dropping sensation and an unprompted memory. A negotiation I’d had years ago with my department. I had secured fair compensation for work they needed done, using the leverage I had. I walked away feeling good about it. And yet, standing at the sink with my guard down, years later, I felt a flash of guilt so unexpected it …
Why your physician guilt may not actually be yours
The momentous annual occasion known as Match Day was recently upon us. Thousands of medical students across the country opened envelopes that revealed their academic destiny for the next several years. What medical students learn during several intense years of study and practical application has evolved over time, with increased recognition that biomedical knowledge is necessary but not sufficient to develop humanistic, person-centered physicians. Noticeably missing from the curriculum, however, …
Medical education needs diversity and true excellence
Something is happening in women’s health care. Perimenopause is finally being discussed openly. Vaginal estradiol has entered mainstream conversation. Testosterone therapy for women is no longer confined to niche clinics or whispered discussions. Across medicine and social media alike, women are asking new questions about tissue health, sexual function, intimacy, discomfort, sensation, and quality of life. And perhaps more importantly, they are no longer accepting silence as an answer.
These conversations …
The exam question OB/GYNs were never taught to ask
Recently, a California jury found the tech giants Meta and Google guilty for the depression and anxiety which ensued in a young woman following her compulsive use of social media. The court found the corporations liable for features that cause children to become addicted to the platforms and that it results in the aforementioned mental health distress. Many are calling this ruling social media’s tobacco moment, citing parallels …
Social media addiction rulings impact mental health
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