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The hidden cost of professionalism in medical training

Hannah Wulk

Education

July 20, 2025

I sat in my pink childhood bed, my name still written in cursive above it from when I redesigned the room at seven years old, staring at the letter that shattered my dream. I had been dismissed from medical school for “professionalism” concerns. I didn’t know what came next. No roadmap. No support. Just the crushing reality that everything I had worked for was suddenly gone.

Medical education demands resilience and …

The cost of ending shadowing in medical education

Matthew Ryan, MD, PhD

Education

July 20, 2025

A faculty-wide email recently announced that shadowing in our emergency department would no longer be recognized as a valid educational activity. I wrote back asking why. The reply was brief, dismissive, and telling:

“It doesn’t pay the rent.”

That line has stuck with me—not just because it was flippant, but because it revealed something deeper about how we now view education.

Shadowing has long served as the first bridge between curiosity and calling …

Why hospital jobs are failing physicians: burnout, pay, and lost autonomy

Justin Nabity, CFP

Finance

July 20, 2025

Hospital employment was once billed as the solution to the headaches of private practice — a way to gain stability, reduce administrative burden, and focus on patient care. But for many physicians, that promise has come undone.

According to the Physicians Foundation’s 2024 report, 60 percent of physicians report frequent feelings of burnout — the highest level on record. Instead of feeling supported, many employed physicians feel …

Why so many doctors secretly feel like imposters

Ryan Nadelson, MD

Physician

July 19, 2025

One of the most important—and least discussed—truths in medicine is this:

Feeling inadequate in medicine isn’t rare. It’s everywhere—quiet, lingering, relentless.

I remember starting my outpatient practice right out of residency. I had joined a large multispecialty group filled with physicians trained at top-tier institutions. Many had been practicing for decades. They were confident. Efficient. Experienced. I was still waiting on my board scores—unsure if I was even certified yet. And yet—there …

Why telling kids to eat less and move more fails to address obesity

Callia Georgoulis

Conditions

July 19, 2025

Despite decades of public health messaging urging children to “eat less and move more,” rates of pediatric obesity continue to rise globally. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1 in 5 children and adolescents aged 2–19 years have obesity, with higher rates among those from low-income or minority backgrounds. While caloric balance is a basic principle of weight regulation, the oversimplification of obesity into a matter of willpower neglects the …

Why enterprise risk management is key to value-based health care success

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

Physician

July 19, 2025

The evolving contemporary era of value-based health care (VBHC) demands new risk leadership. VBHC emphasizes quality, outcomes, safety, equity, and stakeholder satisfaction. With these goals come complex, cross-cutting risks, including workforce shortages, clinical complications, health care staff safety, cyberattacks, and supply chain disruptions. To address the modern risk situation, health care systems must allocate resources to resilient, enterprise-wide risk governance and innovations.

The enterprise risk management (ERM) framework is the centerpiece …

Rethinking physician resilience for sustainable well-being

Sarah Webber, MD

Physician

July 19, 2025

Personal resilience is one of the three core components of the Stanford model of physician professional fulfillment, used across institutions to inform provider well-being strategy. Yet, limited data suggest only a minority of physicians view personal resilience initiatives as beneficial to their well-being, and physicians have expressed resistance and frustration toward organization-based individual resilience promotion.

I have led and participated in workplace meditation courses, stress management talks, …

How shared language saved a patient from isolation

Syed Ahmad Moosa, MD

Physician

July 19, 2025

I was midway through a busy afternoon clinic when my pager erupted—an inpatient consult request. The case sounded messy: Chronic pancreatitis that had suddenly spiraled downward. A fresh, sizable mass sat in the pancreatic head; tumor markers were positive. Two endoscopic biopsies had failed, and surgery felt too risky for this frail patient. Cancer seemed the only plausible answer.

Rheumatology—my service—was called in because her ANA was weakly positive (1:40). In …

The shocking risk every smart student faces when applying to medical school

Curtis G. Graham, MD

Physician

July 18, 2025

The threats we face throughout our medical practice years are rarely published in the world medical practice literature for a good reason. The medical practice system has so many disruptive, threatening, and hidden educational factors to confess to that it is a miracle we have any American physicians still practicing today. That needs to be changed.

Most physicians in private medical practice, who suffer the most economically, are now reaching their …

Clinical ghosts and why they haunt our exam rooms

Kara Wada, MD

Conditions

July 18, 2025

As a quadruple board-certified physician and a patient with a complex autoimmune disease, I live on both sides of the examination table. My professional life is about finding answers; my personal life has been about the agony of waiting for them.

This dual perspective makes it impossible to ignore a systemic problem in modern medicine: A class of diagnoses that live in the shadows. Seronegative Sjögren’s, mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), …

High blood pressure’s hidden impact on kidney health in older adults

Edmond Kubi Appiah, MPH

Conditions

July 18, 2025

Most people think of high blood pressure as a silent threat to the heart. But it’s time we start talking about another organ it quietly destroys: the kidneys.

As a public health researcher and clinician, I have seen how chronic kidney disease (CKD) creeps in unnoticed—especially among older adults—and how hypertension is often the unspoken culprit. Despite being preventable and treatable in its early stages, CKD remains a major cause of …

Deep transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

July 17, 2025

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

Nationally recognized psychiatrist, internist, and addiction medicine specialist Muhamad Aly Rifai discusses his article, “How deep transcranial magnetic stimulation is transforming mental health care.” He shares his experience with deep TMS (dTMS), …

How declining MMR vaccination rates put future generations at risk

Ambika Sharma, Onyi Oligbo, and Katrina Green, MD

Conditions

July 17, 2025

We thought we had moved on from diseases like rubella. But as measles makes a comeback, rubella may not be far behind, and this time, it could harm the next generation before it’s even born. Most people today have never seen a baby born with congenital rubella syndrome, a condition that causes blindness, deafness, heart defects, and developmental delays. That’s not because it stopped happening—it’s because vaccination kept rubella from …

The physician who turned burnout into a mission for change

Jessie Mahoney, MD

Physician

July 17, 2025

When I stepped away from my clinical practice, it wasn’t because I didn’t care. It was because I cared deeply—about my patients, my colleagues, and the future of medicine. I didn’t leave to escape. I left to help heal the culture that was quietly breaking so many of us.

You can love medicine and stop seeing patients. You can love medicine and change the way you see patients. Choosing to follow …

Time theft: the unseen harm of abusive oversight

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Physician

July 17, 2025

Theft, in its essence, is the unlawful taking of something valuable from another. While usually associated with material possessions, it also extends to intangible assets such as time, reputation, and emotional well-being. When authorities like medical boards or the Department of Justice (DOJ) engage in unfair practices grounded in presumptive guilt, they are not just misusing their roles but actively stripping individuals of these invaluable resources—an abuse of power that …

How one unforgettable ER patient taught a nurse about resilience

Kristen Cline, BSN, RN

Conditions

July 17, 2025

Every ED has patients who become part of the landscape. They come in once or twice a week, for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they have chronic medical conditions they are unable to manage. Sometimes they are on the outskirts of society due to mental health or substance abuse disorders. The ER promises a few hours of sleep in a safe place and a meal. I formed an uneasy alliance …

The future of clinical care: AI’s role in easing physician workload

Michael Wakeman

Tech

July 17, 2025

Walk into any emergency room across the country and you’ll see familiar scenes: crowded waiting rooms, overstretched resources, and overworked physicians balancing patient care with substantial administrative burdens. Against this backdrop, physician burnout remains unacceptably high (48.2 percent of physicians), with clerical duties cited as the most common cause. Many physicians also spend significant time after working hours catching up on …

Eric Topol explores the science of super-agers and healthy aging [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

July 16, 2025

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

Cardiologist and author Eric Topol discusses his article, “What super agers can teach us about longevity and health span,” which is an excerpt from his new book, Read more…

Eric Topol explores the science of super-agers and healthy aging [PODCAST]

Why more doctors are leaving clinical practice and how it helps health care

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA

Physician

July 16, 2025

The author of a recent article claimed that “we all lose” when an experienced physician prematurely leaves clinical medicine. Of course, it is inevitable that a clinical career will end, but whether patients and society suffer depends on what that retiring doctor does next. Increasingly, it seems, they pursue other ways to help patients and add value to the system by pursuing non-clinical careers. That’s a good thing, because:

There …
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Why more doctors are leaving clinical practice and how it helps health care

Harassment and overreach are driving physicians to quit

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

Physician

July 16, 2025

In the noble pursuit of healing, physicians, especially those in pain clinics, are increasingly caught between the growing burden of patient expectations and a tightening web of regulatory scrutiny. A recent clinical study and a related article on KevinMD converge to highlight a deeply troubling reality: Clinicians are not only being harassed by distressed patients but are also being punished by the systems meant to regulate or protect health care.

A …

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