Health policy and public health

Narinder Singh Parhar, MD

Strengthen primary care no matter who pays

November 9, 2026Nov 9, 2026

American voters have brought health care affordability back to the center of our national conversation. Younger Americans, in particular, face a difficult question: Will the system they are helping finance be accessible, affordable, and sustainable when they need it? As…

As elected leaders prepare to assume their responsibilities, the medical profession has a responsibility of its own. We should bring forward practical proposals that can help turn public expectations into better care.

Coverage …

Rebuilding public trust in science after COVID-19

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

November 7, 2026Nov 7, 2026

On March 19, 2020, I was called to a meeting by Dr. Bijoy Sahoo, who was serving as provost of our university at the time. I was serving as vice president of the Faculty Senate, and because the Senate president was unavailable, I attended the meeting on behalf of the faculty. The university faced an urgent challenge: how to protect students, faculty, and staff from a rapidly spreading pandemic while …

Giorgi Mzhavanadze & Anastasiya Kalashnikova

Yale’s single-payer study skips the physician shortage

Brian Hudes, MD

November 7, 2026Nov 7, 2026

In August, the Yale School of Public Health announced a preprint projecting that a single-payer system could cover every American, avert about 114,000 deaths a year, and cost roughly $1 trillion less than the system it replaces. The release quotes…

I have practiced gastroenterology for more than thirty years, twenty in private practice and the rest in the …

Real physician voices, twice a week

Free, and one click to unsubscribe.

Medical education

Why smoking cessation takes more than clinician confidence

November 7, 2026Nov 7, 2026

How confident are health care professionals in helping patients quit smoking? And how often does that confidence translate into practical assistance? Our recent research suggests these questions can produce very different answers. In October, we reported findings from a survey…

In October, we reported findings from a survey of 1,538 Ukrainian health care professionals in Healthcare Business Today. The results revealed a striking contrast: Most respondents felt confident advising patients to quit smoking, despite limited formal training and …

Health technology

I build clinical decision support. It does not decide.

Brandy Zachary, DC

November 6, 2026Nov 6, 2026

Last month I wrote here about how AI is changing what patients expect their clinicians to know. Medicine does not have an information problem. It has an interpretation problem. The chart is full. What is missing is someone with the…

In the weeks since, the conversation has moved, and it moved fast. Building clinical decision support has made me ask a related question. …

A stock market crash brings a second crisis: elder fraud

Gerald Kuo

November 6, 2026Nov 6, 2026

At a bank counter in central Taiwan, a man in his sixties tried to break a time deposit and withdraw 1 million New Taiwan dollars. He believed a stock-investment team would manage the money for him. Bank staff became concerned…

The disturbing detail was not the amount. Police had already intervened the previous week when the same man encountered a fraudulent investment scheme. The scammers contacted him …

Drugs and prescribing

How contract research organizations took over drug testing

Martha Rosenberg

November 5, 2026Nov 5, 2026

It's no secret that drug research and development is commercialized. "Technology transfer" and for-profit partnerships have turned some medical centers, universities, and National Institutes of Health research itself into for-profit pipelines for the drug industry. In 2007, Northwestern University, for…

It’s no secret that drug research and development is commercialized. “Technology transfer” and for-profit partnerships have turned some medical centers, universities, and National Institutes of Health research itself into for-profit pipelines for the drug industry.

In 2007, Northwestern University, for example, made $700 million by selling part of its worldwide royalty interest in the anti-seizure medicine Lyrica, which its chemists developed. Pfizer, which sold the drug, paid massive commercial …

Health technology

Who pays physicians to catch AI medical errors?

Brian Hudes, MD

November 5, 2026Nov 5, 2026

Medical AI is deployed on the assumption that a physician will catch its mistakes. One new study asks what happens when the advice is wrong on purpose. In a 2026 medRxiv preprint that has not been peer-reviewed, the authors gave…

Medical AI is deployed on the assumption that a physician will catch its mistakes. One new study asks what happens when the advice is wrong on purpose.

In a 2026 medRxiv preprint that has not been peer-reviewed, the authors gave 225 physicians written neurocritical-care cases with AI advice attached. When the advice was deliberately steered toward a harmful choice, physicians made a harmful decision in 49.4 percent of the targeted decisions. …

Jennifer S. Mensik Kennedy, PhD, MBA, RN

Congress must act on workplace violence against nurses

November 5, 2026Nov 5, 2026

In HBO's The Pitt, nurses are punched, grabbed, and choked while trying to care for patients. The scenes are fictional and dramatic, but they are not exaggerated. The physical danger nurses step into every single shift is painfully real. Across…

In HBO’s The Pitt, nurses are punched, grabbed, and choked while trying to care for patients. The scenes are fictional and dramatic, but they are not exaggerated. The physical danger nurses step into every single shift is painfully real. Across the country, nurses experience workplace violence with alarming regularity, facing physical assault, verbal abuse, threats, and intimidation from patients, family members, and visitors. Too often, this hostility is casually dismissed …

Hidden fees in employer health plans are about to come out [PODCAST]

November 4, 2026Nov 4, 2026

Many companies pay for their workers' health care directly, and the fees buried in those plans have been hard to see. Paul Pender, an ophthalmologist, explains why new transparency and fiduciary rules taking hold in January 2027 will force these…

Listen on Apple Podcasts · Spotify

Listen and followApple Podcasts Spotify YouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes

Many companies pay for their workers’ health care directly, and the fees buried in those plans have been hard to see. Paul Pender, an ophthalmologist, explains why new transparency and fiduciary rules taking hold in January 2027 will force these self-insured employers to ask for that data. This episode is …

Lorraine Marasco Schratz, MD

Voting is not enough: why medical society membership matters

November 3, 2026Nov 3, 20262

As physicians head to the polls, we are afraid for our patients and our profession. We are in a moment of extraordinary turbulence. Administrative overload, political intrusion into clinical care, workforce shortages, hospital and program closures, and public distrust have…

The future of medicine will be shaped by more than who wins at the ballot box. Our elected officials need not only …

Matthew Turner, MD & Kaitlin Rainwater-Lovett, PhD, MD

Are civilian hospitals ready for 1,000 war casualties a day?

November 3, 2026Nov 3, 20262

The looming threat of LSCO It has been decades since the United States has experienced sustained, high-casualty large-scale combat operations (LSCO) at the level of the Second World War, the Korean War, and Vietnam. However, in the changing geopolitical landscape,…

The looming threat of LSCO

It has been decades since the United States has experienced sustained, high-casualty large-scale combat operations (LSCO) at the level of the Second World War, the Korean War, and Vietnam. However, in the changing geopolitical landscape, the possibility of the U.S. entering LSCO is high. Within the next decade, these conflicts are most likely to be with near-peer adversaries in complex, austere, and ambiguous environments.

In …

Genetic screening should not wait for a health crisis

Keelee Moseley, MBA

November 3, 2026Nov 3, 2026

Pregnancy. Marriage. A cancer diagnosis. A sick child. A family tragedy. Too often, something must happen before we start asking what our DNA might tell us. It shouldn't. Genetic screening and education should become a more normal and accessible part…

Pregnancy. Marriage. A cancer diagnosis. A sick child. A family tragedy. Too often, something must happen before we start asking what our DNA might tell us.

It shouldn’t. Genetic screening and education should become a more normal and accessible part of preventive health care, available before a life event or health crisis makes the information urgent.

We already practice prevention. We check blood pressure before a stroke. We measure cholesterol before a …

Self-driving cars are the assistive device nobody markets

Osama Jamil, MD

November 2, 2026Nov 2, 2026

An excerpt from Nobody's Driving: A Neurologist on the Self-Driving Century, and Why One Company Can't Be Allowed to Own It. The numbers vary by study, but somewhere between a third and two-thirds of stroke survivors are back behind the…

An excerpt from Nobody’s Driving: A Neurologist on the Self-Driving Century, and Why One Company Can’t Be Allowed to Own It.

The numbers vary by study, but somewhere between a third and two-thirds of stroke survivors are back behind the wheel within a year. Driving is one of the most demanding things an ordinary brain does: It requires cognition, perception, emotional control, and motor control, all at once, and a …

Private equity replaced my anesthesia group. We can win.

Marco Fernandez, MD

November 1, 2026Nov 1, 2026

Every one of us learned the same lesson early: You cannot treat what you have not examined, and you cannot examine well without first taking a history. We diagnose and plan treatment from the history, the signs, and the symptoms.…

I believe the same is true of the system we practice in. Learning the history of our economics is as important as learning the …

Conditions and diseases

TMS and esketamine work. Community clinics are the test.

Ravi Singareddy, MD

November 1, 2026Nov 1, 2026

For most of the past two decades, community practice has managed treatment-resistant depression (TRD) the way STAR*D described: one medication after another, with remission rates falling below 15 percent by the third trial. Repetitive and deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), FDA-cleared since 2008, and intranasal esketamine (Spravato), approved in 2019, have changed what a community psychiatrist can offer. In pooled trial data and in real-world cohorts, the two …

Academic medicine does not have a monopoly on excellence

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

October 31, 2026Oct 31, 2026

For much of my career, I practiced developmental and behavioral pediatrics far from what many people consider the centers of American medicine. Not in Boston. Not in Philadelphia. Not in Baltimore. Not in the academic corridors that dominate medical journals,…

Instead, I practiced in places like Minot, North Dakota; rural Ohio; Appalachia; Peoria, Illinois; and Phoenix, Arizona. Over time, I came to an uncomfortable conclusion: …

Jill Schwartz-Chevlin, MD, MBA

Why is community-based palliative care so hard to get?

October 30, 2026Oct 30, 2026

After my grandmother fell and fractured her cervical spine, she lived another four years thanks to incredible caregivers, family members, and my own home-based primary care practice, which I started because of her. Twelve million patients in the U.S. living with serious illness need, but cannot access, the palliative care that saved, extended, and improved my grandmother’s life.

The U.S. health care system is not set up to support patients …

A physician’s novel charts a course for health care reform

Paul Pender, MD

October 30, 2026Oct 30, 2026

An excerpt from Jimmy's Story: Forging a New Path for American Healthcare. Looking back, I had submitted my fictional tale, "Standing Vigil 2020," to the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a premier peer-reviewed professional journal. The NEJM had sponsored…

An excerpt from Jimmy’s Story: Forging a New Path for American Healthcare.

Looking back, I had submitted my fictional tale, “Standing Vigil 2020,” to the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), a premier peer-reviewed professional journal. The NEJM had sponsored a fiction-writing contest, and I had received a terse letter of rejection of my submission. Little did I know at the time of the writing that my grandson would ultimately …

U.S. health care won’t be fixed until everyone can see a doctor [PODCAST]