Students, educators, and physicians writing on KevinMD about medical school: admissions and what they select for, the cost of tuition and the debt it leaves, the curriculum and what students say it does and does not teach, Step 1 and the test-prep industry, pass/fail, mistreatment and depression in training, the match, Caribbean schools, and what should change. Most contributors are students writing while still in school, many of them anonymously. For what physicians have said about paying off that debt and the money decisions that follow, see Physician personal finance: what physicians say about their own money, in their own words. For a maintained record of what students and physicians have said about medical school on KevinMD since 2004, see Medical school: what students and physicians say, in their own words. For what physicians and deans have said for and against affirmative action and diversity in admissions, see Race and medicine: what physicians say, in their own words. For what international and Caribbean graduates have said about the Match and visas, see Immigration and medicine: what physicians say about immigrant doctors and immigrant patients, in their own words.
Every nurse, pharmacist, PA, and physical therapist in the country has to complete continuing education (CE) hours to keep their license. Those courses don’t write themselves, and accreditation rules mean they can’t be written by just anyone. They have to come from a clinician with the credentials to back up what’s being taught.
That’s a standing demand for physician expertise. Most physicians have no idea they qualify.
The obvious thing first: Your …
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Monetize clinical expertise without becoming an influencer
“Don’t tell my parents,” Saru whispered as she leaned into my ear as if she was going to tell me her most precious secret. “But what I really want to do is be a stand-up comedian.”
It was the usual scene at a Nepali party. Women were dressed in the latest fashionable saris. Men, at different levels of intoxication, were huddled around laughing at a story. Loud Nepali music blared while …
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Pre-med regret and the comedian who chose medicine anyway
I recently found myself doing something almost every medical student has done before a presentation: searching online for a diagram that could explain a complex concept more clearly than words alone.
What surprised me was not the number of infographics available. It was how difficult it had become to determine who created them, where the information came from, or whether the content had been reviewed by anyone with medical expertise.
In the …
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Medical infographics now look right without being right
“It still haunts me whether I prolonged his suffering or saved his life.”
The physician whispered those words, as if he had been carrying that sentence inside him for decades. I expected uncertainty in medicine. What I never imagined, though, was how long and how memorably physicians carried it.
Like many students, I came to medicine with the belief that progress meant getting closer to certainty. Having seen organ trafficking firsthand, I …
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Clinical uncertainty is missing from medical training
An increasing number of pre-med students in the U.S. are electing to take a gap year, but is this the best option for them? More importantly, is it best for the medical field as a whole?
Many students believe taking a gap year improves their admission chances. While compounding variables prevent conclusive proof that a gap year directly helps, the extra time is understandably attractive, as it allows students to improve …
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Why nearly every pre-med now takes a gap year
“People aren’t the problem. The problem is the problem.” I heard that sentence for the first time sitting in a circle of student desks in a restorative and transformative justice class two years ago. I didn’t know then that I was about to spend the rest of my medical training inside an institution that had reached the exact same conclusion decades earlier, and then largely failed to live by it.
In …
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Why blaming doctors makes patients less safe
Every application cycle, graduate medical education (GME) program directors face a familiar question when screening applications submitted through the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS): Where should the numerical filters be set?
Two recent changes have simplified and narrowed that question. USMLE Step 1 is now reported as pass/fail, removing its score variations as a screening variable. USMLE Step 3 scores are rarely available at the time of application, since most applicants …
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Why residency programs should cap Step 2 CK scores
Research misconduct deserves scrutiny. But scrutiny should not become spectacle. The landmark 1980s case of U.S. cardiology researcher John Darsee remains a defining example. Auditors found extensive data fabrication, and federal sanctions reached beyond institutional leadership, forcing science research to confront supervision, authorship, and institutional accountability. The lesson was not simply that one researcher failed. The institution and research system also need safeguards.
Four decades later, the Retraction Watch leaderboard of …
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Research integrity and accountability lessons from 2026
Research retractions are not all misconduct, and a leaderboard is not a verdict. The Retraction Watch database leaderboard, updated August 2026, shows researchers with dozens or hundreds of retractions but also cautions that its ranking is unofficial and shaped by what can be verified. Its treatment of the landmark 1980s case involving a Harvard University cardiologist illustrates why raw counts require context. Nonetheless, these cases expose recurring vulnerabilities that every …
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7 lessons from research retractions about integrity
The moment that changed the trajectory of a 79-year-old female patient’s life did not beep, flash, calculate, or appear in an inbox. It did not come from an algorithm or an abnormal lab value. It began quietly, with my mentor’s hands resting on her abdomen.
Like my peers at Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in Harlem, I have spent years learning the language of modern medicine: lab values, imaging findings, differential …
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Why the physical exam still matters in modern medicine
Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have served as critical pillars of America’s health care workforce for more than a century. Despite representing only a small fraction of U.S. colleges and universities, HBCUs have produced a disproportionate number of Black physicians, nurses, pharmacists, public health professionals, and biomedical scientists. At a time when the United States faces physician shortages, widening health disparities, and declining access to care in underserved communities, …
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HBCUs built the doctors America cannot afford to lose
It was almost midnight, and I was staring at the word oxybutynin like it had personally wronged me.
I had seen it maybe twenty times that week. Flashcard, missed. Practice question, missed. I knew it treated something with the bladder, I think, and that it blocked some receptor, and past that, my brain just went quiet. Around me, the library was clearing out. I had two hundred more drugs to learn, …
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How pharmacology mnemonics got me through med school
Everything medical schools believe about us seems wrong. Medical schools call us “Native American,” but many of us dislike this word. The traditional among us refuse this colonial branding with every fiber of our being. Yet many people believe the media that says “Indian” is offensive and so they call us “Native American.” Ask yourself: Would a Ukrainian mother ever call herself Native Russian? Would a Palestinian man ever call …
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Medical school application barriers fail Native people
Artificial intelligence has been part of conversations about the future of medicine for years. As a medical student, I have heard about its potential in lectures, read about its development in health care, and watched discussions about how it may change the way physicians practice. For a long time, though, it felt like something that would arrive later, after I had already learned how to be a doctor.
Then I saw …
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Learning medicine with AI before learning to think
Like many doctors, I was initially skeptical about artificial intelligence (AI). As a retired Australian anesthetist, I had spent decades relying on clinical experience, scientific evidence, and professional judgment. I never imagined that one of the most useful health education tools I would encounter would be a mobile phone.
In 2024, I was living with obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, and gastric reflux. Like many people, I accepted these …
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7 ways to use AI for better health and nutrition
He has been tired for eight months. Not the tiredness that follows a bad night of sleep, a hard week, or a season of stress. The kind that just does not lift. The kind that is still there after the weekend, after the vacation, after every reasonable explanation has been tried and discarded. He also has a cough that will not quit, something happening with his nails, unrelenting brain fog, …
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Why complex chronic illness slips through the cracks
Generative AI systems can create references to papers that do not exist and make them look real. In medicine, a fabricated or poorly verified reference is not simply a bibliographic error. It weakens the chain of evidence on which reviews, guidelines, teaching, and clinical judgment may depend.
A recent article by Topaz and colleagues in The Lancet highlights an important and growing threat to scientific integrity: the increasing appearance of …
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AI fabricated references threaten medical evidence
