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5 patterns behind health care startups that fail

Finance

April 24, 2026

Most health care startups don’t fail because the technology is bad. They fail because of mistakes that happen long before the product ever reaches a clinical setting. After seven years of evaluating health care companies as a physician-scientist turned venture investor (and making over 20 investments across digital health, biotech, medical devices, and therapeutics), I’ve started to see the same patterns repeat.

These aren’t obscure business school failures. They’re patterns that …

Rethinking nutrition policy on ultra-processed food

Hana Kahleova, MD, PhD

Conditions

April 24, 2026

For more than a decade, the phrase “ultra-processed food” has functioned as nutritional shorthand for danger, a dietary villain blamed for rising rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. The public message has been simple: If it is ultra-processed, avoid it. But science is rarely that simple.

My colleagues and I recently reviewed the growing body of research examining ultra-processed foods, not as a single monolithic category, but as distinct …

Preparing for Medicaid cuts and the imperial health boomerang

MarkAlain Dery, DO, MPH

Policy

April 24, 2026

I first met Ramon in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when I was moonlighting in local ERs and assisting wherever needed. New Orleans has a long-standing historical and economic connection to Honduras, primarily through the banana trade and shipping routes linking Honduran ports to New Orleans. These routes facilitated both commerce and migration between the two. Ramon, whose family has deep roots in both Honduras and New Orleans, arrived here …

Why accountability in medicine must guide health care AI

Ian Hu and Pao Hsuan Huang

Tech

April 24, 2026

Late at night, after basketball games or practices, with the physical exhaustion of the court still settling in, I often find myself staring at my laptop. I am watching how long it takes to complete something that has nothing to do with sports, or even actual patient care. It is documentation. Coding. Forms. Insurance language that seems designed less for clinical clarity than for mere survival within a bureaucratic system.

In …

Silence at the chessboard changed how I talk to patients [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

April 23, 2026

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

When is the most powerful thing a medical student can do in a patient’s room simply to stop talking? Medical students Jay Pendyala and Jonathan Berg draw on years …

Why experiential consent is replacing traditional medical consent forms

Ron Tongbai, MD

Physician

April 23, 2026

Imagine sitting in a witness box while a plaintiff attorney holds up your drafted, 15th-grade surgical consent form. You know the patient signed it. You know you spent 10 minutes explaining the risks. But then the attorney asks the patient: “When the doctor warned you about positive dysphotopsia, did you know it meant you wouldn’t be able to drive your grandchildren home at night?” The patient cries. The jury glares …

Why career pivots are a valid path in medical training

Whitney Black, MD

Physician

April 23, 2026

The medical students I work with are already starting to close doors. They are in their twenties, still in training, and they are already narrowing, already deciding which parts of themselves fit inside the life they are building toward. I recognize it because I did the same thing. I just did not realize it until much later. And no one told me there was another way to look at it. …

How to treat chronic pain and depression together

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions

April 23, 2026

As a physician who has spent years managing patients with persistent pain, I often encounter the same frustrating cycle. A patient arrives with unrelenting back pain that has lasted for months. They describe not just physical discomfort but a deepening sense of hopelessness, fatigue, and withdrawal from life. Is the pain causing the depression, or did underlying depressive symptoms amplify an initially manageable ache into something chronic and debilitating? It …

Transforming sepsis care with rapid host response diagnostics

Jasjot S. Johar, MD

Conditions

April 23, 2026

In busy emergency departments, sepsis is often discussed as something we “cannot miss” rather than a diagnosis we can confidently make. Patients may arrive with signs of an infection and physiologic abnormalities, yet fall into the gray zone where sepsis is possible, but far from certain. Over the last decade our definition of sepsis has evolved to recognize that sepsis is more than an infection and …

How research laboratory culture shapes mentorship in academic life

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

Conditions

April 23, 2026

Every research mentor eventually faces a difficult question: What, and who, will continue when the work is no longer theirs to carry forward?

We often speak about mentoring, yet the dilemma of mentorship is rarely addressed directly. Perhaps it lies at the intersection of responsibility and uncertainty. Mentorship is often imagined as guidance freely given, with apprenticeship unfolding naturally. In modern academic life, however, the laboratory is shaped not only by …

Why early detection technology and precision medicine are failing patients

Julie Chen, MD

Physician

April 23, 2026

The tools to detect serious disease years before symptoms appear already exist. What we are waiting on is a health care system structured to use them. Early in my career in primary care, I watched patients with vague symptoms and normal lab results get dismissed as anxious or mildly depressed. While some were, others were experiencing the very earliest stages of disease. Signals that more advanced diagnostics would have caught, …

Gradually, then suddenly: Dr. Robert Wachter on health care’s giant AI leap [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

April 22, 2026

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

What if the biggest problem with electronic health records was not the technology itself, but that we expected it to transform medicine when it could only lay the foundation? …

The continuum of fertility care: Why IVF is not the only option

Scott Morin

Conditions

April 22, 2026

At a time when one in five married American couples experience infertility, and one in three American men have a low sperm count, concerns around fertility and conception have led millions to seek solutions. But family building is rarely a linear process, and for every individual or couple able to successfully conceive on the first try, there are just as many who may seem to be doing everything right without …

Physician autonomy is not separate from patient care

Corinne Sundar Rao, MD

Physician

April 22, 2026

Recently, I came across the Charter of the Soignés (“those being cared for”) by French physician and writer Martin Winckler from The School of Caregivers (2019).

This is not a legal document, but an ethical framework. It outlines 10 principles centered on dignity, autonomy, and the humanity of the patient.

The first nine principles focus on what we would hope our patients experience. The recognition that a person is more than a …

Why heart failure care requires spaced repetition for doctors

Vimal George, MD

Conditions

April 22, 2026

It is 4:50 p.m. on a Thursday. Your last patient is a 67-year-old with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. He has been hospitalized twice this year. His medications look familiar. A beta-blocker. An ACE inhibitor. A loop diuretic. But something is missing. You scroll through the chart. No mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist. No SGLT2 inhibitor. No ARNI. You pause. You know the guidelines. You have heard the talks. You have …

51 cases that reframe methylene blue serotonin syndrome

Steven E. Warren, MD, DPA

Meds

April 22, 2026

A patient walks into my office. She is 52, exhausted, brain-fogged, gaining weight, and six years into sertraline 100 mg. I mention methylene blue as a mitochondrial support at 10 mg orally.

She looks at me like I just suggested arsenic.

“My pharmacist said I can never take methylene blue because I am on an antidepressant. He said it causes serotonin syndrome.”

I hear this every week. And every week I have to …

Therapeutic alliance in psychiatry matters more than ever

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Conditions

April 22, 2026

Each May, during Mental Health Awareness Month, the health care industry releases its usual statements about access to care, workforce stress, and the enduring shadows of stigma. I usually read them between back-to-back appointments, staring at a screen full of diagnostic codes. The systemic issues are always important, yet, amidst the charts, the 20-minute med checks, and the rhetoric, there remains a more profound question I have to ask myself …

Why doctors struggle to listen to your body after an injury

Diane Alexander, MD

Conditions

April 22, 2026

For 26 years as a plastic surgeon, I have given my patients the same advice after surgery: Listen to your body. Pain, fatigue, and swelling are not inconveniences. They are signals. They are the body’s language, guiding us toward healing or warning us when we have gone too far. What I have learned this year, at 65, is how difficult that advice can be to follow.

In January, I was training …

IVF insurance coverage depends on your ZIP code

Laurel A. Coons, PhD

Conditions

April 22, 2026

Two patients can have the same infertility diagnosis, need the same treatment, and see the same specialist. Yet one may move forward with insurance coverage while the other is left staring at a bill for tens of thousands of dollars. In the United States, that difference is often not medical. It is geography. As a biomedical scientist, I’ve seen how evidence should guide care. Yet for infertility, your ZIP code …

Ketamine therapy and the primacy of mind in modern medicine

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Meds

April 22, 2026

In the modern clinic, we often operate under an unstated a priori assumption that if a phenomenon is real, its primary explanation must be molecular. As a psychiatrist, I find this reductionist bias increasingly apparent in how we conceptualize “breakthrough” treatments like ketamine therapy for depression or chronic pain. When we discuss how ketamine works, the conversation almost instantly gravitates toward the neurotransmitter system, synaptic plasticity, glutamate surges, and the …

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