Primary Care

WISeR Medicare pilot: the new “AI death panel”?

Physician

January 11, 2026

There are many ways to say “no” in medicine.
“No, this antibiotic won’t help a viral infection.”
“No, this test won’t change our management.”
“No, that surgery carries more risk than benefit.”

And then there is the newest way:
“No, the algorithm doesn’t prioritize your health.”

Welcome to WISeR, short for “Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction,” a Medicare pilot program that promises to usher artificial intelligence into health care decision-making with all the subtlety of …

Psychedelic retreat safety: What the latest science says

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Physician

January 9, 2026

“Turn on, tune in, drop out” was a rallying cry for liberation. “What a long, strange trip it’s been” is how we nostalgically narrate the aftermath. Psychedelic-assisted therapy now sits somewhere between those two cultural bookends: a rapidly professionalizing clinical enterprise and a booming, loosely regulated marketplace of “retreats” selling healing, insight, and transcendence.

The science behind psychedelics is more real than ever. So are the risks. The problem is …

Medical brain drain leaves vulnerable communities without life-saving care [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

January 8, 2026

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

Premedical student Samah Khan discusses her article “The crisis of physician shortages globally.” Samah draws a powerful parallel between the medical exodus in Pakistan and the doctor deserts of California’s Central Valley, …

Collaborative partnerships save rural health care from collapse [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

January 6, 2026

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

Health care executive Jason Griffin discusses his article “The digital divide in rural health care.” Jason explains how rural providers in the U.S. face critical infrastructure failures and staffing shortages that threaten …

Why doctors must stop waiting and reclaim their lives

Jessie Mahoney, MD

Physician

January 6, 2026

In medicine, waiting is normalized. We’re trained in it. Praised for it. We learn to delay sleep, meals, vacations, and emotions. We delay joy. Rest. Fulfillment. Relationships. Children.

From the very beginning, we’re taught that waiting is a virtue. That endurance is professionalism. That sacrificing our own needs is a sign of how much we care.

During training, we wait (for sleep, for food, for recognition). We wait for the pager to …

The hidden link between circadian rhythm and physician burnout

Shiv K. Goel, MD

Physician

January 6, 2026

By 11 p.m., my clinic was dark but my brain wasn’t. I found myself scrolling through my schedule for the next day: 22 patient visits, a pile of unsigned notes, two meetings squeezed into “lunch,” and a post-call morning that somehow still started at 7 a.m. None of these tasks were unusual, but what struck me was the growing tightness in my chest and the realization that I had quietly …

Physician on-call compensation: the unpaid labor driving burnout

Corinne Sundar Rao, MD

Physician

January 6, 2026

As an internal medicine physician, I’ve spent years watching one quiet assumption extract more unpaid labor from physicians than anything else in our system. It’s not charting. It’s not meetings. It’s not metrics.

It’s call.

I wrote a post on my LinkedIn page about my thoughts regarding call. It resonated with many physicians, and I received many messages. It became clear that being “on call” is something that is rarely spoken about …

The Dr. Google debate: Building a doctor-patient partnership

Santina Wheat, MD, MPH

Physician

January 4, 2026

If you’ve been practicing medicine for any length of time, you’ve likely felt that familiar moment of overwhelm when a patient walks in with a stack of printouts, a list of 30 questions, or a frustrated statement like, “Well, I did my research.” And if we’re honest, many of us feel our chest tighten just a little. We feel the time pressure. We feel the responsibility. And sometimes, we feel …

Physician investment in patients: ethical risks and rewards

Francisco M. Torres, MD

Physician

January 3, 2026

At its best, the doctor-patient relationship is an intimate one. Often, our patients appear before us in the most vulnerable moments of their lives. We treat their diseases, but we also tend to their emotional and spiritual well-being. That kind of intimacy can be meaningful and rewarding, but it can also breed awkward and even potentially compromising interactions. That is particularly true when money gets involved.

Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the …

How physician coaching helps restore energy reserves

Diane W. Shannon, MD, MPH

Physician

January 3, 2026

I’ve recently been intrigued by this question: Are you giving from extra or essence?

In many respects, giving from one’s essence is what burnout is all about. Your energy reserves (emotional, physical, mental, cognitive) are heading rapidly toward empty. Because of a mismatch between the energy drain from internal and external stressors and the ability to replenish your energy, you are left depleted.

I see this mismatch daily in the physicians whom …

Public health and primary care integration

Tyler B. Evans, MD, MPH

Physician

January 3, 2026

An excerpt from Pandemics, Poverty, and Politics: Decoding the Social and Political Drivers of Pandemics from Plague to COVID-19.

We talk about health as if it were an individual act of will, a matter of personal choice or risk tolerance. But anyone who has walked alongside people living in poverty, in refugee settlements, in overcrowded housing, or on the street knows that illness does …

The shifting meaning of supervision in modern health care

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Physician

January 2, 2026

The discomfort I felt around supervising did not arise in the clinic. It arose while reading the agreements meant to define it.

Supervisory agreements. Collaborative designations. Regulatory language that needed to be reconciled (carefully, deliberately) because names, roles, and obligations matter. Like many physicians, I have signed these documents countless times. But reading them slowly, rather than reflexively, produced an unexpected unease, one that felt structural rather than personal.

The language was …

Why doctors struggle with treating friends and family

Rebecca Margolis, DO and Alyson Axelrod, DO

Physician

January 1, 2026

Early in medical school, a professor warned us: “Never prescribe for someone who isn’t your patient.” He shared a story of writing a simple antibiotic for a friend who later developed Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a devastating outcome that haunted him long after. His message was clear: There is a bright line between caring and causing harm.

Fifteen years out, we now understand just how blurry that line really is.

“First, do no harm” …

Lessons on leadership from a Navy surgeon and NFL doctor

David B. Mandell, JD, MBA

Physician

December 31, 2025

In a valuable episode of the Wealth Planning for the Modern Physician podcast, host David Mandell, JD, MBA, spoke with Dr. Matthew Provencher, an orthopedic surgeon, Navy veteran, former team physician for the New England Patriots and Boston Red Sox, and current partner at The Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado. Dr. Provencher’s story spans small-town roots, elite military service, academic medicine, professional sports, and entrepreneurial ventures. His journey offers physicians …

Why women’s symptoms are dismissed in medicine

Shannon S. Myers, FNP-C

Conditions

December 31, 2025

I walked out of my physician’s office steady and clear in my decision to transfer my care. I didn’t accuse her of anything. I didn’t raise my voice. I simply informed her that I would be transitioning to another clinician within the same concierge program.

She immediately assumed I was leaving for financial reasons and suggested physicians to see outside the system. When I clarified that her administrator had already approved …

When racism findings challenge institutional narratives

Anonymous

Physician

December 31, 2025

In the annals of social science, few imperatives are more solemnly intoned than the necessity of measuring racism with the cold precision that only quantification can provide. Only when bias is reduced to p-values and effect sizes may one confidently proclaim, “Behold, the incontrovertible evidence of racism,” secure in the knowledge that no reasonable interlocutor can wriggle free on the strength of anecdote or wounded sentiment. Yet such measurements, to …

Emotional awareness and expression therapy explained

David Clarke, MD

Conditions

December 30, 2025

Most people assume that pain and illness are caused only by injury or disease. If your back hurts, it must be damaged; abdominal pain must come only from inflammation, infection, or tumor. Most physicians learn this in medical school, as I did. But treatment based on this assumption often fails to provide relief for persistent pain, leaving millions of patients and countless well-intentioned physicians frustrated and in despair. The result …

Mindfulness in the journey: Finding rewards in the middle

Diane W. Shannon, MD, MPH

Physician

December 29, 2025

I recently returned from a truly magical trip to Iceland. While there, my husband and I hiked, ate wonderful food, and soaked in a different culture.

On day five of six, we ventured out to find what was described as a “hot springs river,” a body of water fed equally by glacier melt and geothermal hot springs. As a floating enthusiast, this was a must-see for me.

We hiked for an hour, …

Restoring clinical judgment through medical education reform

Anonymous

Physician

December 28, 2025

A modest proposal for the reform of American medicine might begin, improbably enough, in a suburban pediatrician’s office where, last week, a physician of evident earnestness instructed my adolescent son to sleep until noon whenever possible, on the theory that tardy rising is the royal road to superior intelligence. The authority cited was a single paper (published, with all due respect, in the journal Personality and Individual Differences) bearing the …

Home for Christmas: a physician’s tale of prior authorization

Edward Anselm, MD

Physician

December 27, 2025

It was Christmas Eve 2005, and the health plan was closing at 3 p.m. By 4 p.m., the nurses, doctors, pharmacists, and support staff who handled utilization management for HIP Health Plan were already on their way home. My usual role at the health insurance company involved creating quality profiles for physicians caring for our roughly 1 million members. But that afternoon, I was covering hospital admissions so colleagues could …

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