Kenneth Lin, MD

Kenneth Lin is a family physician who blogs at Common Sense Family Doctor.

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Physicians

How to recruit more students into family medicine

Kenneth Lin, MD

August 16, 2020Aug 16, 20208

In 2019, a Policy One-Pager produced by the Robert Graham Center reported that the percentage of the active U.S. physician workforce in primary care practice declined from 32 percent in 2010 to 30 percent in 2018. Although family physicians represent 4 in 10 primary care physicians, in several states, a large percentage of family physicians are older than 55 years and anticipated to …

Meds

When should you prescribe statins for older adults?

Kenneth Lin, MD

January 24, 2020Jan 24, 20203

Although I have never been a big fan of modeling studies, viewing their appropriate role as hypothesis-generating rather than clinical decision-supporting, a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine deserves kudos for trying to do what neither the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association nor the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force did in their respective guidelines on primary prevention of cardiovascular disease for adults …

Conditions

Clinical practice guidelines have problems, but they’re not broken

Kenneth Lin, MD

September 10, 2019Sep 10, 20192

A Health Affairs blog post titled "Fixing Clinical Practice Guidelines" echoed several concerns I've discussed previously: practice guidelines are being produced in abundance but often have variable methodological quality, financial conflicts of interest that threaten objectivity, and/or poor applicability to…

A Health Affairs blog post titled “Fixing Clinical Practice Guidelines” echoed several concerns I’ve discussed previously: practice guidelines are being produced in abundance but often have variable methodological quality, financial conflicts of interest that threaten objectivity, and/or poor applicability to the clinicians and populations for whom they are intended. To address these problems, the authors reasonably suggested restoring funding for AHRQ’s National Guideline Clearinghouse and …

Education

Why you shouldn’t place too much importance in college and medical school rankings

Kenneth Lin, MD

June 4, 2019Jun 4, 2019

If you read my curriculum vitae, you might assume that I must have a high opinion of the U.S. News & World Report higher education rankings. I earned my bachelor's degree from Harvard University, #2 behind Princeton in the "Best…

If you read my curriculum vitae, you might assume that I must have a high opinion of the U.S. News & World Report higher education rankings. I earned my bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, #2 behind Princeton in the “Best National Universities” category. My Master of Public Health degree is from Johns Hopkins, the #1 public health school. And my medical degree is from NYU, tied with Cornell and the Mayo Clinic as …

Physicians

Interpersonal medicine already exists. It’s called family medicine.

Kenneth Lin, MD

January 10, 2019Jan 10, 20192

A commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine titled "Beyond Evidence-Based Medicine" received much well-deserved criticism for not only mischaracterizing EBM, but advocating for a novel approach, "interpersonal medicine," that was explicitly codified in the recognition of the U.S.…

A commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Beyond Evidence-Based Medicine” received much well-deserved criticism for not only mischaracterizing EBM, but advocating for a novel approach, “interpersonal medicine,” that was explicitly codified in the recognition of the U.S. specialty of family practice nearly 50 years ago. Here’s what the authors wrote about this practice of medicine that is, apparently, new to them but well-known …

Conditions

PSA-based screening for prostate cancer: Interpreting the changing guidelines

Kenneth Lin, MD

November 8, 2018Nov 8, 20187

Comparing the 2018 U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendation statement on prostate cancer screening in the October 15th issue of American Family Physician with its previous recommendation, the first question family physicians ought to ask is: What new evidence compelled the USPSTF to move from recommending against PSA screening in all men to determining that there was a small net benefit for screening in some men? …

Policy

Considering the recent setbacks of evidence-based medicine

Kenneth Lin, MD

October 8, 2018Oct 8, 20183

For my students in 2018, it's difficult to imagine an era when there was no such thing as evidence-based medicine (EBM). When I started medical school in 1997, though, the term had only been in use for six years, having…

For my students in 2018, it’s difficult to imagine an era when there was no such thing as evidence-based medicine (EBM). When I started medical school in 1997, though, the term had only been in use for six years, having been introduced by Dr. Gordon Guyatt at McMaster University (though EBM’s intellectual origins can be traced to several key individuals). When I tell trainees how recently EBM …

Policy

Why this physician teaches health policy in medical school

Kenneth Lin, MD

August 28, 2018Aug 28, 2018

From 2009 to 2012, I directed the graduate course "Fundamentals of Clinical Preventive Medicine" at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. It was a required course for Hopkins preventive medicine residents, and also usually attracted other master's level…

From 2009 to 2012, I directed the graduate course “Fundamentals of Clinical Preventive Medicine” at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. It was a required course for Hopkins preventive medicine residents, and also usually attracted other master’s level public health students and undergraduates with a strong interest in medicine. The class size was 15 to 25 students. In that setting, with a small group who generally believed that …

Policy

The National Guideline Clearinghouse will go offline. Patients will be worse off.

Kenneth Lin, MD

June 19, 2018Jun 19, 2018

Absent a last-minute, lifesaving intervention, after 20 years of reviewing and summarizing clinical practice guidelines in a continuously updated database, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s National Guideline Clearinghouse (NGC) will go offline on July 16th. Prior to its untimely death due to budget cuts, the NGC not only served as a one-of-a-kind online resource for clinicians, researchers, and educators, but raised the bar on guideline …

Policy

The AHRQ is in the line of fire. Here’s why you should care.

Kenneth Lin, MD

March 17, 2018Mar 17, 20182

For the past 30 years, a little-known U.S. health agency has supported and produced volumes of groundbreaking research on how to make health care safer, less wasteful, and more effective. Dubbed “the little federal agency that could,” AHRQ has accomplished this feat with a small fraction of the budgets of its higher-profile cousins, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. …

Physicians

This physician won’t practice parachute-based medicine

Kenneth Lin, MD

January 29, 2018Jan 29, 2018

I try my best to practice evidence-based medicine on a daily basis. When I know that the test or intervention that I am recommending for my patient is based on expert opinion rather than reliable data on patient-oriented outcomes that matter, I invariably make a point of saying so. It has been my position for several years that despite the impressive effectiveness of newer antiviral medications for hepatitis C at …

Policy

What’s going to replace hospitals that downsize?

Kenneth Lin, MD

January 3, 2018Jan 3, 20184

I recently rounded on patients at Providence Hospital as the attending physician on the family medicine residency program's inpatient service. Providence recently closed its maternity ward as the first step in a planned redevelopment of the hospital grounds into a…

I recently rounded on patients at Providence Hospital as the attending physician on the family medicine residency program’s inpatient service. Providence recently closed its maternity ward as the first step in a planned redevelopment of the hospital grounds into a “health village.” In the short term, the hospital’s decision to stop delivering babies may worsen maternal health disparities, as the entire eastern side of Washington, DC is …

Conditions

Should we screen African-American men for prostate cancer?

Kenneth Lin, MD

July 23, 2017Jul 23, 2017

Regular readers of my blog know that I believe that the harms of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer outweigh the benefits — if benefits exist at all. That isn’t to say that I will not order the test in a man who understands the risks and expresses a clear preference to be screened. In a recent editorial in American Family Physician, I explained my …

Physicians

Many places in America are essentially devoid of doctors

Kenneth Lin, MD

June 16, 2017Jun 16, 20172

I recently attended a conference in Savannah, Georgia sponsored by the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research. Since I haven't spent much time in Georgia outside of Savannah and Atlanta, the welcoming plenary on improving health outcomes for the state's…

I recently attended a conference in Savannah, Georgia sponsored by the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research.

Since I haven’t spent much time in Georgia outside of Savannah and Atlanta, the welcoming plenary on improving health outcomes for the state’s rural and underserved populations was eye-opening. According to Dr. Keisha Callins, Chair of the Department of Community Medicine at Mercer University, Georgia ranked 39th out of 50 states in primary care physician …

Conditions

What Tom Price doesn’t know about prostate cancer screening

Kenneth Lin, MD

February 16, 2017Feb 16, 20175

Dr. Tom Price may become the first medical doctor to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 24 years. One might think that having completed medical school and practiced orthopedic surgery before entering politics might give him some extra insight into what works and what doesn’t in medicine. But judging by a letter to then-HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that he signed in 2011 objecting to the …

Policy

What are the ethics of health care reform?

Kenneth Lin, MD

January 26, 2017Jan 26, 2017

It's been a rough past couple of months not only for millions of Americans whose health care futures depend on decisions to be made by the new Congress and the Trump administration but for those of us who teach about…

It’s been a rough past couple of months not only for millions of Americans whose health care futures depend on decisions to be made by the new Congress and the Trump administration but for those of us who teach about the U.S. health system for a living. As one health policy expert I follow tweeted only half-facetiously, on election night: “Dear students: all that stuff I taught you about the …

Policy

Instead of repealing the Affordable Care Act, strengthen it

Kenneth Lin, MD

November 12, 2016Nov 12, 20169

On the election day that made Donald Trump the next president of the United States, I traveled to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to give a lecture. Long a conservative political stronghold, Lancaster County was dotted with “Make America Great Again” campaign signs, forecasting Trump’s comfortable 47,000 vote margin there, which ended up being more than two-thirds of his 68,000 victory margin in Pennsylvania, one of the states that effectively decided …

Conditions

Do-it-yourself lab tests are a bad idea. Here’s why.

Kenneth Lin, MD

July 3, 2016Jul 3, 201614

It sounded too good to be true when I first heard about Theranos, a company that promised to revolutionize medical testing by making it possible to perform dozens of tests on a single drop of blood, rather than the several tubes that would typically be required. And that wasn’t all. Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford dropout and media magnet whose wardrobe seems to consist solely of all-black outfits, promised …

Conditions

How to discourage overuse of cancer screening in older adults

Kenneth Lin, MD

May 10, 2016May 10, 20162

I recognized a glitch in my electronic medical record's decision support software when it prompted me to consider prostate and colorectal cancer screening in a 93-year-old man, who, though remarkably vigorous for his age, was unlikely to live for the…

I recognized a glitch in my electronic medical record’s decision support software when it prompted me to consider prostate and colorectal cancer screening in a 93-year-old man, who, though remarkably vigorous for his age, was unlikely to live for the additional 10 years needed to benefit from either test. Although deciding not to screen this patient was easy, determining when to stop cancer screening in older patients is often more …

Conditions

Is the government’s National Pain Strategy doomed to fail?

Kenneth Lin, MD

April 21, 2016Apr 21, 201614

Over the past few months, the federal government has mobilized against what is being called "the opioid crisis": a national epidemic of fatal overdoses that in 2014 claimed more than 14,000 lives, the most ever recorded. Since most of these…

Over the past few months, the federal government has mobilized against what is being called “the opioid crisis“: a national epidemic of fatal overdoses that in 2014 claimed more than 14,000 lives, the most ever recorded. Since most of these opioids were originally prescribed by physicians to treat pain, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently finalized a guideline containing recommendations …