KevinMD.com

EHR vendor evaluation should happen before the demo

Tech

May 4, 2026

Most EHR demos are built around the same set of features: mobile access, AI-assisted documentation, integrated billing, patient portal design, and telehealth. Those features matter, but they do not prove the system will work in a real clinic day.

The demo is a controlled environment. The vendor chooses the patient, the encounter, the documentation path, the billing example, and the person clicking through the screen. A clean demonstration can hide a …

How political divisiveness impacts your health and well-being

Mark F. Sullivan, MD

Physician

May 4, 2026

Physicians are trained to listen for symptoms that point to deeper problems. For example, chest pain can mean heart disease, and ongoing fatigue might signal depression or another illness. I once cared for a middle-aged teacher who showed how political divisiveness can affect health. She came in with headaches and trouble sleeping. While we spoke, she shared that her symptoms got worse during heated political debates at her school and …

Medical expert witness report language gets cases struck

Tracy Liberatore, Esq, PA

Conditions

May 4, 2026

If you think one word inside a medical expert report cannot break a case, look at what happened in Kline v. Zimmer. A defense expert testified about possible alternative causes of a plaintiff’s injury, not probable ones. That single word, possibly, is the reason opinions like his are routinely challenged. Across multiple jurisdictions, courts have held that an expert who testifies in possibilities is offering no evidence at all.

In civil …

GLP-1 agonists and the hidden power of outdoor exercise

John La Puma, MD

Meds

May 4, 2026

A recent report documented something remarkable: Americans on glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonists are falling in love with exercise for the first time. A man who struggled to walk to his mailbox now hikes seven miles a day. A woman who needed a cane ran her first five-kilometer (5K) race. A rock climber went from three workouts a week to five.

These drugs proved what physicians should have said more clearly long …

How minor injuries lead to flesh-eating bacteria in rural Nigeria

Dr. Mansur Auwal Sani

Conditions

May 4, 2026

It started with a tiny scratch. A man tending his farm had pricked his finger on a thorn. He shrugged it off. Days later, he returned to the clinic with a fever, swelling, and excruciating pain in his arm. Within hours, the flesh on his hand and forearm was dying, a necrotizing infection, a flesh-eating bacteria taking hold. I have seen this story more times than I care to count …

Why artificial intelligence displacement threatens medical specialties

H. Michael Boulton, MD

Physician

May 3, 2026

Diagnostic radiology, as a physician-staffed specialty, will not exist in its current form within 20 years. Neither will diagnostic pathology. Neither, in all likelihood, will the outpatient model of endocrinology or general internal medicine as we currently understand it. These are not fringe predictions from technologists who have never set foot in a hospital; they are the logical endpoint of capability curves …

Why your doctor invests like a vaccine skeptic

Hernan Moscoso Boedo, PhD

Finance

May 3, 2026

Consider a pediatrician and his wife, a cardiologist. Together they earn over $700,000 per year. They have $200,000 sitting in a savings account earning 4 percent. They own a $750,000 house and lease a luxury sedan. They pay a financial advisor 1 percent annually to manage their retirement accounts, mostly because a colleague recommended him. Neither has ever heard of an expense ratio. When a friend suggests they open a …

The real work starts after a mental health crisis

Kenneth Scott Burnham, DO

Physician

May 3, 2026

I have intubated people who took every pill they could find. I have told families, in bare conference rooms, that the person they brought in barely made it. I have done this across 23 years in emergency medicine, thousands of cases, in every configuration of crisis the human mind can produce, and I believed, the way physicians are trained to believe, that stabilizing the crisis was the job. That what …

Rethinking blood thinners for atrial fibrillation patients

Saurabh Gupta, MD

Conditions

May 3, 2026

At the American College of Cardiology meeting, a new trial was shared that might change how we view one of the world’s most common heart conditions. At its core, the study asked a simple but disruptive question: Do patients with atrial fibrillation really need to take blood thinners for the rest of their lives to prevent stroke? For decades, the answer has been yes. This trial suggests the answer …

How childhood scarcity fuels imposter syndrome in medicine

Archana Agarwal, MD

Physician

May 3, 2026

When I was growing up in Darjeeling, a single pair of school shoes had to last the entire year. They came from Bata, simple, sturdy, and meant to endure more than they reasonably could. My sister, just a year younger than me, had the exact same pair. Side by side, our shoes began their journey identical, but they did not age the same way. She was careful, measured, and gentle …

I Googled my own name and a corporate clinic I’ve never worked at appeared [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 2, 2026

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

What happens when a physician searches her own name online and gets redirected to a billionaire-backed corporate clinic she has no connection to? Stephanie Waggel, a physician and …

Why artificial intelligence in medicine cannot replace clinical intuition

Garrett Terracciano, MD

Physician

May 2, 2026

It was a cold January night, around two in the morning on my third consecutive 34-hour shift as a senior pediatric resident at a major freestanding children’s hospital in the northeast. My floor had absorbed four admissions in the last hour, our eleventh of the night. The last was a teenage boy, new onset type 1 diabetes presenting in diabetic ketoacidosis. By the time the call came through from the …

The evolving structural challenges of modern pain medicine

Dharam Persaud-Sharma, MD, PhD

Conditions

May 2, 2026

Pain medicine has expanded rapidly in both scope and technical complexity over the past two decades. At the same time, uncertainty surrounding fellowship recruitment, workforce stability, and long-term career sustainability has become more visible. While pain medicine is often described as an evolving interdisciplinary specialty, current trends suggest a broader structural question: whether the systems supporting training, research, and workforce development are evolving at the same pace as the therapies …

National Hospital Week reveals what care really takes

Brian Sutter

Conditions

May 2, 2026

Shift change is one of the most critical windows in any hospital. It depends on teams staying tightly aligned across dozens of moving parts.

A respiratory therapist tweaks a ventilator seconds before a desaturation alarm triggers. Down the hall, a transporter clears a bottleneck to move a patient upstairs. At 3:00 a.m., a lab flags a subtle shift in bloodwork, changing the care plan before a crisis could unfold.

From the outside, …

A medical school dismissal highlights disability discrimination

Anonymous

Education

May 2, 2026

Meet the standards. Demonstrate competence. Move forward. That is the promise medical students are told to trust.

But a federal lawsuit filed against a private medical school puts that promise to the test. What happens when academic standards, professionalism judgments, and disability accommodations collide?

At the center of that lawsuit is a fourth-year medical student who, according to public court filings, was dismissed amid allegations of disability discrimination, failure to accommodate, …

The limits of large language models in clinical practice

Edward G. Rogoff and Alena Ivashenka, PhD

Tech

May 2, 2026

Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant concept in modern medicine. It is already entering clinical workflows through tools that draft patient notes, summarize charts, generate patient education materials, and assist with decision-making. At the center of this shift are large language models such as ChatGPT, Med-PaLM, and other health care-adapted systems. For clinicians, the most important question is not whether these tools are impressive. It is whether they understand …

AI is already reading your dental X-rays and you probably have no idea [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 1, 2026

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

When was the last time your dentist mentioned that artificial intelligence was scanning your X-rays before you even sat down in the chair? General dentist Sowjanya Gunukula explains how …

The memory of water and a historic scientific controversy

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

Conditions

May 1, 2026

In 1988, an unusual scene unfolded at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research Unit 200 in Clamart, France. The then editor of Nature, John Maddox, arrived at Jacques Benveniste’s laboratory accompanied by investigator Walter Stewart and the professional magician and skeptic James Randi. Their task was not to perform tricks but to examine an extraordinary scientific claim: that biological activity might persist even when no molecules of …

Why nursing home regulations must address mental illness

Amanda M. Buster and J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD

Conditions

May 1, 2026

Frederick Smith is in his 70s, has advanced Alzheimer’s disease, and lives in a nursing home just south of Boston. He has not had a meal in three days because his roommate is stealing his food and no one has stopped it, either because staff have not noticed or do not have the time or training to intervene.

Tens of thousands of older adults spend their final days in nursing homes …

The crash cart that taught me physician-led investing

Harsha Moole, MD

Finance

May 1, 2026

Every physician remembers the first time they ran a code. The adrenaline. The organized chaos. The moment you reach for the crash cart and trust, without thinking, that everything inside it is where it should be, that the medications aren’t expired, and that the equipment has been checked.

But here’s what most physicians don’t think about: Who’s making sure that crash cart is actually compliant? Who’s tracking whether every piece of …