Physicians writing on KevinMD about prescribing: the prior authorization that stands between a prescription and a pharmacy, opioids and the tapers that followed the CDC guideline, GLP-1 drugs and what happens when patients stop them, compounded and direct-to-consumer drugs, shortages, and what a prescription costs the patient. Three maintained records draw on this archive: Prior authorization: what physicians say, in their own words, Opioids: what physicians and pain patients say, in their own words, and GLP-1 drugs: what physicians say about Ozempic and its successors, in their own words.

The AI innovation-access gap in medicine

Medications
December 22, 2025

Artificial intelligence has transformed pharmaceutical science more rapidly than any other part of health care. AI can now:

  • Identify molecular targets faster than human researchers
  • Compress early discovery timelines from years to months
  • Simulate how millions of compounds might behave in the body
  • Predict toxicity or poor efficacy before a drug is ever synthesized
  • Help design personalized therapies built on real-world clinical data

Recent analyses in Drug Discovery Today and …

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The AI innovation-access gap in medicine

The loss of community pharmacy expertise

Conditions and Diseases
December 15, 2025

Walk into most community pharmacies today and you’ll notice something off. The pharmacist who used to remember your name and medication history is gone. The one who caught that dangerous drug interaction last year? Also gone. In their place, a rotating cast of temporary faces, each one just trying to survive the shift.

This isn’t about a labor shortage. We have pharmacists. What we’re losing is something else entirely. Expertise, continuity, …

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The loss of community pharmacy expertise

How should kratom be regulated? [PODCAST]

Podcast
December 14, 2025
YouTube video

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

Retired nurse practitioner Heidi Sykora discusses her article, “The case for regulating, not banning, kratom.” She provides an evidence-based perspective on why kratom (Mitragyna speciosa) should not be treated as a dangerous …

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How should kratom be regulated? [PODCAST]

Why the cannabis ethics debate is really about human suffering

Medications
December 10, 2025

Most discussions about cannabis stay on the surface: legality, crime, or medical claims. But the core question is this: What suffering does a society allow? After watching a recent documentary with police, lawyers, physicians, and families, I found cannabis is the stage. The real drama is the system behind it. When ethics is pushed far, inconsistencies become impossible to ignore.

1. Legal ethics: When the law punishes pain instead of harm

Some …

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Why the cannabis ethics debate is really about human suffering

Why medical malpractice data is hidden

Physician
November 19, 2025

I learned the forbidden truth by searching “how many medical malpractice lawsuits are filed per year and how many are frivolous?” The answer is “17,000-20,000 and all are legitimate.” This answer is incongruous with seven facts.

The facts are: First, a complication causes a medical malpractice lawsuit. Some are medical errors; some are random errors-of-nature. Since an error-of-nature is not caused by negligence, a resulting lawsuit is frivolous. Second, …

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Why medical malpractice data is hidden

Are you neurodivergent or just bored?

Medications
November 18, 2025

Do you get bored when reading a boring book? Do you struggle to concentrate when you haven’t had enough sleep? Do you have difficulty following instructions, make careless mistakes and forget to return calls? Are you sometimes the last one to “get” a joke?

You may be “suffering from” with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and are “neurodivergent” and “on the spectrum.”

Today’s ASD “neurodivergence” craze has spawned at least two lucrative and …

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Are you neurodivergent or just bored?

Pharmacy benefit manager reform vs. direct drug plans

Medications
November 6, 2025

Much has been made of the move by President Donald Trump and the pharmaceutical industry to offer direct-purchase drug programs at heavily discounted rates. Following the announcement of these new programs and TrumpRx, we’ve heard news and opinion pieces from every major outlet, but missing in the conversation is one of the most important voices: the patient. Key questions remained unanswered:

“What does this mean for my care?”

“Does this work with …

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Pharmacy benefit manager reform vs. direct drug plans

Why pharmacist burnout is a patient safety issue

Conditions and Diseases
October 5, 2025

Behind every prescription safely dispensed stands a pharmacist making dozens of clinical decisions under mounting pressure. What happens when that pressure becomes unbearable? When the professionals who are the last line of defense against medication harm are pushed to their breaking point, patient safety breaks with them. This crisis is real and it is often invisible.

The invisible epidemic

Surveys and workplace reports repeatedly show that large numbers of pharmacists experience burnout …

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Why pharmacist burnout is a patient safety issue

How India-Pakistan tensions could break America’s generic drug pipeline

Medications
September 25, 2025

With over 270 active drug shortages and growing global instability, the United States must protect itself from a worsening crisis in cancer care. The fragile supply of generic chemotherapy drugs like cisplatin, which is important for treating bladder, lung, and testicular cancer, could collapse if geopolitical tensions between India and Pakistan escalate further. To preserve this diminishing supply, the U.S. must reduce its overreliance on Indian pharmaceutical manufacturing and …

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How India-Pakistan tensions could break America’s generic drug pipeline

Drug giants face suit over hidden cancer risks

Medications
September 20, 2025

Bridgett Brown, a resident of California, developed breast cancer from using brand-name and generic versions of the antipsychotics Risperdal (risperidone) and Zyprexa (olanzapine) says a new lawsuit from the Wisner Baum law firm.

Neither Brown or her two prescribing physicians knew or “had reason to know” that the drugs could cause breast cancer since the drug manufacturers “obfuscated and disclaimed such risks while promoting these dangerous, expensive drugs over safer, …

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Drug giants face suit over hidden cancer risks

The diseconomics of scale: How Indian pharma’s race to scale backfires on U.S. patients

Medications
September 16, 2025

Why Indian pharmaceutical companies run the risk of driving up U.S. consumer drug prices when scaling too quickly: the diseconomics of scale.

Why the U.S. looks to India as a global supply chain hub for medications

India’s pharmaceutical industry saves U.S. consumers billions, but scaling too fast is a mistake. Premature scaling through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is not just unsustainable, it is reckless and a recipe for inefficiency, error, and rising …

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The diseconomics of scale: How Indian pharma’s race to scale backfires on U.S. patients

How drug companies profit by inventing diseases

Medications
September 4, 2025

Funding from direct-to-consumer (DTC) “ask your doctor” drug ads has captured news media outlets and all but blocked important health stories like these. Read on.

1. “Hormone replacement therapy” (HRT) is back.

It is said that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and nowhere is this more evident than the re-marketing of HRT to menopausal women who do not remember the first debacle (which increased the risk …

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How drug companies profit by inventing diseases

Every medication error is a system failure, not a personal flaw

Medications
August 29, 2025

Every 24 hours, at least one person dies from a preventable medication error. Every hour, countless others suffer complications that could have been avoided with better systems. Yet despite billions invested in health care technology and training, these numbers are not improving.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: We have been solving the wrong problem.

For decades, health care has treated medication errors like individual failures — a tired nurse, a distracted doctor, a …

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Every medication error is a system failure, not a personal flaw

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mRNA post vaccination syndrome: Is it real?

Conditions and Diseases
August 15, 2025

This past week, an unhinged man in Atlanta committed an atrocity. He went to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) with five guns and killed a policeman. He blamed the COVID-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal, and it is reported that he had been reaching out for mental health assistance for weeks.

Since January 2022, I have been interacting with national experts on a clinical problem that has hit …

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mRNA post vaccination syndrome: Is it real?

Why kratom addiction is the next public health crisis

Medications
July 29, 2025

In recent years, kratom, a botanical herb indigenous to Southeast Asia, has surged in popularity across the United States.

Marketed aggressively online and sold openly in vape shops, convenience stores, and specialty herbal outlets, kratom is often portrayed as a natural remedy, an herbal escape from chronic pain, anxiety, and opioid withdrawal. But beneath the alluring veneer of wellness and relief lies a dangerous, largely unregulated substance capable of causing severe …

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Why kratom addiction is the next public health crisis

Pharmacists are key to expanding Medicaid access to digital therapeutics

Medications
July 11, 2025

More than 78 million Americans rely on Medicaid or CHIP for their health care. Yet many still cannot access FDA-approved digital therapeutics because their state does not include them in covered benefits.

Prescription digital therapeutics (PDTs) are software-based treatments authorized by the FDA. They are delivered through smartphones or tablets and are used to manage conditions such as substance use disorder, ADHD, diabetes, and chronic insomnia. For people who face long …

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Pharmacists are key to expanding Medicaid access to digital therapeutics

From stigma to science: Rethinking the U.S. drug scheduling system

Medications
July 3, 2025

In 1971, President Nixon initiated a battle that would reshape the United States: The War on Drugs. As a key part of that campaign, he enacted the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), which authorized the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to categorize modern-day controlled substances into 5 “schedules” based on their “medical use, potential for abuse, and safety or dependence liability.” They range from Schedule I, which are substances with no …

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From stigma to science: Rethinking the U.S. drug scheduling system

How drugmakers manipulate your health from diagnosis to prescription

Medications
June 27, 2025

It is said that 57 percent of U.S. doctors receive drugmaker/industry funding and 66 percent of U.S. adults are now on prescription drugs. Any correlation?

Drug ads now cast such a wide “symptom net,” comedian Chris Rock said he expected to hear, “Do you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning? You might be suffering from ….”

Here are six ways drugmakers hijack U.S. medicine

Diagnosing. Once upon a time …

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How drugmakers manipulate your health from diagnosis to prescription

The food-drug interaction risks your doctor may be missing

Medications
June 24, 2025

As a health care professional, I’ve often observed how one critical aspect of medication safety and efficacy gets overlooked: food-drug interactions.

Every day, we prescribe and dispense powerful medications — but what patients eat alongside those medications can completely alter their effects.

This isn’t just a pharmacy concern. It’s a multidisciplinary issue that deserves greater attention from physicians, pharmacists, and patient educators.

The physician’s role: Asking the right questions

We often do a solid …

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The food-drug interaction risks your doctor may be missing

Reassessing the impact of CDC’s opioid guidelines on chronic pain care [PODCAST]

Podcast
June 11, 2025
YouTube video

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

Internal medicine and pediatric physician Charles LeBaron discusses his article “How the CDC’s opioid rules created a crisis for chronic pain patients.” Charles discusses the 2016 CDC opioid guideline, initially framed as …

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Reassessing the impact of CDC’s opioid guidelines on chronic pain care [PODCAST]

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