Last updated October 3, 2026.
Burnout is the one word that appears in every record on this page. “Moral injury” entered the profession’s vocabulary subject by subject between 2018 and 2026, and artificial intelligence reached the posts about medical school and nursing before it reached the posts about cancer or opioids. None of that can be seen from a single essay or a single subject; it can only be seen across an archive, and this page is the index to it.
Thirty-seven maintained records of what physicians have actually written, subject by subject, drawn from the KevinMD archive of more than 20,000 essays published since 2004 and from The Podcast by KevinMD, every episode of which has carried a full transcript since July 2024. Each record answers the questions people ask about its subject, and every claim in it carries the name of the physician who made it, the date they made it, and a link to the original. Where physicians disagree, both sides are on the page under their own names.
That is the point of them. A summary of what physicians think can be generated in a second and checked by no one. These records show who said it, when, and how the argument changed over twenty years, which is a different kind of thing and cannot be produced without the archive underneath it. KevinMD was founded in 2004 by Kevin Pho, MD, a board-certified internal medicine physician in Nashua, New Hampshire, and publishes physicians, nurses, students, and patients writing under their own names.
What these records are. Essays submitted voluntarily to one publication and selected by its editor. They are not a survey and not a sample of physicians. Every percentage counts published posts, not people, and a post that mentions a term has not endorsed it. The section “How are the records built?” explains the rest.
The records by the numbers
37subject records
1,710essays cited
1,151named authors quoted
2,262podcast episodes transcribed
On this page
What can you only see across the records?
A phrase entered the profession’s vocabulary and can be dated subject by subject
“Moral injury” first appears in the burnout and medical ethics records in 2018, then in artificial intelligence, residency, and medical school and physicians and administrators in 2019; opioids, physician suicide, medical errors, women in medicine, and cancer in 2020; vaccines in 2021; nursing, mental health, aging and dementia, and children’s health in 2022; race and medicine, heart disease, and women’s health in 2023; primary care in 2024; surgeons and surgery and diabetes and obesity in 2025; and direct primary care, end of life, violence against health care workers, and physician careers in 2026. It does not appear in the immigration and medicine or board certification records. One to twenty-four posts per record, which is why it is traceable. These are first appearances in the records named, not in the whole archive, and they do not show the phrase passing from one subject to another.
AI reached some subjects and not others, and 2026 shows exactly which
Among posts published in 2026, AI is mentioned in 13 of 32 medical school posts, 13 of 54 nursing posts, 27 of 127 mental health posts, 16 of 59 aging and dementia posts, 7 of 36 heart disease posts, 25 of 75 physicians and administrators posts, 8 of 41 medical ethics posts, 7 of 43 surgery posts, 8 of 23 medical errors posts, 8 of 37 primary care posts, 4 of 13 physician careers posts, and 2 of 9 board certification posts, but only 5 of 52 cancer posts, 3 of 64 women’s health posts, 4 of 45 children’s health posts, 4 of 28 diabetes and obesity posts, 1 of 21 opioid posts, and none of the 14 direct primary care or 8 physician suicide posts. 2026 runs through mid-September and the denominators are small.
Burnout is the only subject that turns up everywhere
The word appears in every one of the thirty-six essay records. Leaving aside the burnout record itself, it runs from 2 percent of vaccine and malpractice posts to 25 percent of artificial intelligence posts and 45 percent of physician suicide posts.
The first two are measured on the twenty-eight records rebuilt most recently, with one matching rule applied to all of them. The third draws on all thirty-six.
Topic directory
Thirty-seven records, grouped. The full description of each is below.
What are the KevinMD records?
The profession and its people
Physician burnout: what physicians say, in their own words
585 posts · 2009 to 2026
KevinMD published five posts with burnout in the title in 2009 and 87 in the first nine months of 2026. The phrase “moral injury” appears in no burnout post before 2018 and in about one in seven since 2024. Physicians on the site now disagree about whether burnout is the right word at all, and the sharpest recent argument is that most interventions add programs without removing work.
Questions it answers
Physician suicide: what physicians say, in their own words
161 posts · 2005 to 2026
Written to safe-messaging standards with crisis resources on the page. Mentions of confidentiality, hiding, or silence rose from 10 percent of posts before 2014 to 74 percent since 2023, which is the corpus’s own finding about what physicians believe stands between them and help. The posts since 2020 are about the Breen Act, the 988 line, and physicians writing under their own names about surviving.
Questions it answers
Women in medicine: what women physicians say, in their own words
262 posts · 2005 to 2026
Parity at the door and not inside: half of students since the early 2000s, 15 percent of chairs, a pay gap that survives every adjustment applied to it, maternity leave measured in days, and being called nurse described the same way in 2013 and 2024. The structural frame rose from 37 percent of posts to about 58; the dissent, “a choice many of us feel lucky to make,” is on the page.
Questions it answers
Race and medicine: what physicians say, in their own words
312 posts · 2004 to 2026
Two records: what Black, Asian American, Latino, and Native American physicians have written about being in medicine, and what physicians of every background have written about their patients. Fifty-four posts in 2020, and 103 across 2020 and 2021 against 88 in the fifteen years before. The affirmative action argument is recorded from both sides by name and not adjudicated.
Questions it answers
Nursing: what nurses and physicians say, in their own words
525 posts · 2005 to 2026
The only record in which most voices are not physicians: 178 nurse bylines to 143 physician. Nurses describe thirteen-hour shifts without a break and six patients where there should be four; physicians describe nurses as the people who monitor the doctors. Both converge on one answer: staffing or ratios went from 1 percent of posts before 2010 to 32 percent since 2023.
Questions it answers
Residency: what residents and attendings say, in their own words
526 posts · 2004 to 2026
Eleven physicians across eight years argue the duty hour question and the evidence they cite on both sides is mostly null. Intern year is described in 2018 and 2026 in the terms Kevin Pho used the week he finished residency in 2004. Since 2023 the vocabulary is pay, unions, and mistreatment, and “abuse, bullying, or humiliation” went from zero to 14 percent of posts.
Questions it answers
Medical school: what students and physicians say, in their own words
1,169 posts · 2004 to 2026
Only 430 of the 1,169 posts carry a physician byline; most of the rest were written by students while still in school. The subject moved from anatomy and the white coat to debt and depression to Step 1 and the test-prep industry to pass/fail, and since 2023 to admissions, research pressure, and AI. Research or publications now appear in half of posts.
Questions it answers
Medical ethics: what physicians say, in their own words
307 posts · 2005 to 2026
The four principles are easy to recite and do not decide the hard cases. Physicians describe informed consent as a form nobody sits down to obtain, honesty as a liability inside institutions that treat disclosure as risk, conflict of interest as both a real corruption and an accusation that has become excessive, and rationing as something the United States already does and will not name. Moral distress is named in 17 percent of the 2025 and 2026 posts against 2 percent in 2013 to 2016. Paternalism, paying for organs and surrogacy, and whether an oath means anything are argued by both sides on the page.
Questions it answers
Violence against health care workers: what physicians and nurses say, in their own words
59 posts · 2009 to 2026, the smallest record on the site
Violence is treated as part of the job, and the people it happens to say it is not: nearly three-quarters of workplace assaults occur in health care, half of emergency physicians have been physically assaulted, and 3 percent say the hospital pressed charges. The record also holds the bullying nurses and residents describe from their own colleagues. Underreporting or silence is named in 43 percent of posts since 2025.
Questions it answers
88 posts · 2004 to 2026
The United States depends on immigrant physicians for its rural hospitals and its primary care and treats them, and immigrant patients, as provisional: visas denied after the Match, employment tied to status, letters withheld, and, since 2025, patients who skip the clinic because agents may be in the hall. ICE or deportation appears in 45 percent of posts before 2017 and 32 percent since 2025. Anonymous is the most frequent byline.
Questions it answers
Surgeons and surgery: what surgeons say, in their own words
611 posts · 2005 to 2026
The operation is the easy part to see and the hardest part to judge: surgeons have argued for fifteen years about whether residents really do the cases they scrub on, whether a checklist prevents anything, whether the public should see a surgeon’s complication rate, and whether the robot is worth $2,489 more than the laparoscope. AI appears in 18 percent of posts since 2025 against 4 percent in 2020 to 2022. Both sides of the checklist, public reporting, volume, and robot arguments are cited.
Questions it answers
Board certification: what physicians say about the boards and MOC, in their own words
95 posts · 2008 to 2026
Physicians value passing the boards once and have argued for a dozen years that recertification was never shown to make anyone a better doctor: the American Board of Internal Medicine apologized to its diplomates in 2015, Texas and Michigan passed laws, and in 2026 the argument is an antitrust lawsuit and the physicians certified before 1990 who never have to recertify. MOC appears in 86 percent of the 2015 and 2016 posts. The boards’ own leaders are cited and identified as such.
Questions it answers
Practice, policy, and money
Primary care: what physicians say, in their own words
1,078 posts · 2004 to 2026
The fourth-largest corpus on the site, after cancer, COVID-19, and medical school, and the one where the same sentence has been written for twenty years: primary care is worth the most and paid the least. Administrative burden appears in 55 percent of posts since 2022 against 10 percent before 2010, access in 59 percent against 14, and the patient-centered medical home, the answer of 2014, has fallen from 36 percent to 15.
Questions it answers
Private equity and corporate medicine: what physicians say, in their own words
81 posts · 2012 to 2026
Physicians who sold describe a promise of relief that became productivity quotas within the first contract cycle; attorneys describe what to put in the contract before the sale. The record also shows private equity moving, since 2025, into the direct primary care and concierge models physicians had built as the escape. The defense of private equity on the site comes mostly from non-physicians.
Questions it answers
Medical malpractice: what physicians say, in their own words
445 posts · 2004 to 2026
The policy argument moved from caps to defensive medicine to merit; the experience of being served, deposed, and tried is described in the same words in 2013 and 2026. “Frivolous” appeared in 3 percent of posts from 2004 to 2007 and appears in 41 percent since 2021, largely the work of one contributor, and the page says so.
Questions it answers
Scope of practice: what physicians, nurse practitioners, and PAs say, in their own words
58 posts · 2007 to 2026
KevinMD publishes both sides under one masthead, and the page cites nurse practitioner and PA authors at the same weight as physicians. Since 2021 “turf” and “team” have nearly vanished from the vocabulary while safety, cost, and liability took over, and AI now appears in 44 percent of posts as a new argument about what any clinician can do unsupervised.
Questions it answers
The electronic health record: what physicians say, in their own words
471 posts · 2004 to 2026
KevinMD published physicians on electronic records for five years before the 2009 HITECH Act paid for adoption. Meaningful use peaked as a subject in 2013 to 2016 and faded; burnout went from 1 percent of EHR posts to 41 percent; scribes from 6 to 34; AI from 1 to 56. Physicians stopped writing about the record as a subject around 2017 and started writing about what it does to them.
Questions it answers
Direct primary care: what physicians say, in their own words
140 posts · 2006 to 2026
Argued under two names for twenty years, concierge medicine and then direct primary care. The physicians who opened practices describe leaving insurance as the only way to keep caring for patients; the critics ask who is left behind. The recent record is failures, employer contracts, and the math, with consultants who sell into the market identified as such.
Questions it answers
Physician personal finance: what physicians say about their own money, in their own words
414 posts · 2006 to 2026
Physicians earn in the top few percent, start a decade late with $200,000 in debt, and were taught nothing about either. The record is a prologue, a boom of 97 posts in 2018 alone when the pseudonymous physician finance bloggers arrived, and a turn since 2023 toward money as a burnout problem: burnout went from 11 percent of posts to 43, and financial advisors from 20 to 43. The planners, agents, real estate sponsors, and coaches who sell into the subject are identified as such.
Questions it answers
158 posts · 2008 to 2026
Physicians are trained for one job and left to work out the rest of a career alone: contracts signed unread, signing bonuses that are loans, non-competes that move families, and whether leaving clinical medicine is a rescue or a loss. Non-competes appear in 10 percent of posts before 2014 and 26 percent since 2024. The coaches, recruiters, attorneys, and staffing firms who sell into the subject are identified as such, and posts bylined by vendors are counted but not cited.
Questions it answers
Medical errors: what physicians say, in their own words
383 posts · 2004 to 2026
The profession arguing about a number and confessing a memory: physicians on the site rejected the “third leading cause of death” figure within days of its 2016 publication and have kept rejecting it, while the first-person “I made a mistake” essay has never exceeded 4 percent of posts in any period. Systems against people, apology laws that do not work, and the second victim argued both ways.
Questions it answers
Artificial intelligence: what physicians say, in their own words
517 posts · 2006 to 2026
A fifteen-year prologue saying the technology was not ready, then 470 posts since 2023 and 207 in 2026 alone. The argument changed subject three times in four years: what the tools could do, then documentation and burnout, then who is responsible when the tool is wrong. Posts mentioning responsibility or accountability went from 28 percent in 2024 to 54 percent in 2026. Updated quarterly.
Questions it answers
Physicians and administrators: what physicians say about who runs medicine, in their own words
505 posts · 2006 to 2026
The argument is about who decides. Physicians have counted administrators on the site since 2014, from 2,500 percent growth to ten for every physician in 2026, and describe a shift of power from the exam room to the C-suite measured in RVUs and satisfaction scores. Posts mentioning autonomy rose from 4 percent before 2013 to 15 percent since 2025. The remedies argued: become the administrators, leave the institutions, or make them answer for their own numbers; the alternatives to employment are sold on the page by the physicians who left, and identified as such.
Questions it answers
Clinical subjects
Cancer: what physicians say, in their own words
1,255 posts · 2004 to 2026
The largest corpus on the site, written by oncologists, radiologists, nurses, patients, and physicians who were treated for cancer themselves. The screening argument has run since the 2009 mammography guidelines without settling, and three subjects are new since 2022: what the work does to oncologists at 15 percent of posts, disparities at 15 percent, and AI at 23 percent.
Questions it answers
Opioids: what physicians and pain patients say, in their own words
228 posts · 2007 to 2026
The same site published “we were duped by Purdue” in 2016 and “the guideline response became the second crisis” in 2025, and both are on the page with names and dates. Chronic pain patients appear in 63 percent of posts in 2016 to 2017, drop to 11 percent in 2020 to 2022, and return at 66 percent since 2023; mentions of suicide went from 5 percent to 31 percent over the same span.
Questions it answers
Vaccines: what physicians say, in their own words
545 posts · 2004 to 2026
The longest record of how physicians talked about vaccine refusal before the pandemic: 320 posts before 2020 on Wakefield, the exam-room conversation, dismissing families, measles, exemptions, and staff mandates. The autism claim was in a third of posts through 2019, fell to 1 percent during the pandemic, and is back in 24 percent since 2023.
Questions it answers
End of life: what physicians say, in their own words
503 posts · 2004 to 2026
The essays that belong to KevinMD alone are the ones in which a physician describes a patient who died. Around them: hospice used in the last days rather than the last months, code status decided at three in the morning, directives misread in both directions, and the assisted-dying argument with both sides at equal weight, including two terminally ill physicians on opposite sides.
Questions it answers
GLP-1 drugs: what physicians say about Ozempic and its successors, in their own words
74 posts · 2022 to 2026
The newest subject on the site and the fastest growing: 34 of the 74 posts were published in the first nine months of 2026. Physicians agree the drugs work and argue about everything after that, whether obesity is a disease, what happens when patients stop, who pays, and whether teenagers should take them, with the physicians who sell into the subject identified as such. The cited prices run from $1,600 a month in 2022 to $50 under Medicare in 2026.
Questions it answers
Mental health: what psychiatrists and physicians say, in their own words
1,195 posts · 2004 to 2026
The argument on the site has moved from whether mental illness is real to who can get treated for it: posts mentioning shortage, waiting, or access rose from 4 percent before 2013 to 20 percent in 2023 and 2024, and the sharpest critics of psychiatry on the page are psychiatrists, on the DSM, on overdiagnosis, and on prescribing. Ketamine, adult ADHD, autism, and AI chatbots are where the record is growing; 127 posts in 2026 is the most of any year. Physicians writing about their own mental health are on the burnout and physician suicide records.
Questions it answers
Aging and dementia: what physicians say, in their own words
544 posts · 2004 to 2026
Physicians describe a system built for something other than old age: hospitals that discharge into a first week of chaos, nursing homes they would not choose for their own parents, Medicare that was never meant to pay for long-term care, and about 7,000 geriatricians for the fastest-growing age group in the country. The most distinctive voice is the physician writing as a son or daughter; posts mentioning caregivers rose from 16 percent before 2013 to 36 percent since 2025. Alzheimer’s biomarkers and drugs, when to stop screening, and longevity medicine are where physicians disagree. Dying and hospice are on the end of life record.
Questions it answers
Heart disease: what physicians say, in their own words
449 posts · 2004 to 2026
The fights are about prevention, not treatment: statins for people who have never had a heart attack, pills for mild hypertension, CPR on the very old, and whether a cardiologist’s income shaped the test. The statin argument that began with the 2013 guideline is being reargued in 2025 by a lipidologist who calls the drugs the gospel, and cardiologists on the site have been candid since 2009 that imaging and procedures were paid and ordered accordingly. The record thinned from 2017 to 2022 and has doubled since 2023 on CPR, atrial fibrillation screening, heart failure drugs, and wearables.
Questions it answers
Women’s health: what physicians say, in their own words
479 posts · 2004 to 2026
The conditions women describe were dismissed, and the physicians writing agree with them: endometriosis diagnosed after eight and a half years, perimenopause never taught in residency, a maternal death rate that is the highest among wealthy nations and two to three times higher for Black women, and a postpartum year the system treats as over at six weeks. Posts mentioning Black women rose from 1 percent before 2013 to 6 percent since 2025, and posts mentioning menopause from 4 to 15 percent. Both sides of the breastfeeding, hormone therapy, and abortion arguments are cited under their own names.
Questions it answers
Children’s health: what pediatricians say, in their own words
741 posts · 2004 to 2026
The pediatricians writing spend most of their time talking parents down from fear and the system up from neglect: fever is how the child feels, an ear infection can wait a day, a baby sleeps alone on its back, and one in five children is obese while the pediatrician who treats them sees 25 patients a day at Medicaid rates below Medicare. Posts mentioning Medicaid or CHIP rose from 5 percent before 2013 to 10 percent since 2025. Vaccines and teen mental health are routed to their own records.
Questions it answers
Diabetes and obesity: what physicians say, in their own words
198 posts · 2005 to 2026
Telling patients to eat less and move more did not work, and physicians have spent fifteen years arguing about what to say instead: they agree insulin costs too much and BMI misclassifies a third of the people it labels, and disagree on whether obesity is a disease and whether fat acceptance is health or harm. Stigma, shame, or bias appears in 8 percent of posts before 2013 and 9 percent since 2025. The GLP-1 drugs have their own record.
Questions it answers
Records built differently
COVID-19: what physicians wrote as it happened
1,226 posts · 2020 to 2026
A primary record rather than an argument: 779 posts in 2020, 430 of them in March, April, and May, organized by when they were written. Fear for the writer’s own family was in half the posts at the peak; hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin never exceeded 6 percent in any period. The disagreements are recorded as physicians made them and not adjudicated.
Questions it answers
Take-home messages: what physicians say when asked to leave one
2,419 answers · 2020 to 2026
Asked what a listener should carry away, physicians name something to do rather than something to feel: 44 percent of answers tell the listener to do something and about one in twenty-five is encouragement. The only record built from speech, and the one place in the archive where more than sixteen hundred guests answer an identical question: 1,686 named guests across 2,262 transcribed episodes, every one since June 2020, 298 of them appearing more than once, quoted by name and month with a link to each episode, 64 episodes in all. It is rebuilt monthly as new episodes air.
Questions it answers
The records side by side
The thirty-six essay records hold 16,477 topic memberships rather than 16,477 different posts: an essay about a nurse burning out under an electronic record belongs to three records and counts in each. The thirty-seventh record, take-home messages, profiles 2,419 spoken answers and has no row here because its unit is an answer, not a post.
Two patterns stand out. Burnout runs through every subject. Insurers dominate the two subjects about escaping them, prior authorization at 88 percent of posts and direct primary care at 74, and barely register in the records about training, at 8 percent for medical school and 5 for women in medicine.
| Record | Posts | Posts since 2023 | Mention burnout | Mention insurers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physician burnout | 585 | 265 | 94 percent | 18 percent |
| Prior authorization | 90 | 48 | 38 percent | 88 percent |
| Private equity and corporate medicine | 81 | 48 | 23 percent | 55 percent |
| Medical malpractice | 445 | 99 | 2 percent | 33 percent |
| Scope of practice | 58 | 16 | 12 percent | 29 percent |
| Electronic health record | 471 | 46 | 10 percent | 20 percent |
| Opioids | 228 | 80 | 5 percent | 27 percent |
| Direct primary care | 140 | 42 | 22 percent | 74 percent |
| Residency | 526 | 85 | 15 percent | 11 percent |
| Medical school | 1,169 | 139 | 12 percent | 8 percent |
| Artificial intelligence | 517 | 470 | 25 percent | 16 percent |
| End of life | 503 | 81 | 6 percent | 9 percent |
| COVID-19 | 1,226 | 92 | 8 percent | 10 percent |
| Medical errors | 383 | 73 | 8 percent | 17 percent |
| Women in medicine | 262 | 73 | 23 percent | 5 percent |
| Race and medicine | 312 | 93 | 6 percent | 18 percent |
| Nursing | 525 | 139 | 16 percent | 10 percent |
| Vaccines | 545 | 46 | 2 percent | 10 percent |
| Primary care | 1,078 | 124 | 10 percent | 32 percent |
| Cancer | 1,255 | 213 | 3 percent | 13 percent |
| GLP-1 drugs | 74 | 72 | 8 percent | 30 percent |
| Physician personal finance | 414 | 113 | 21 percent | 38 percent |
| Physician suicide | 161 | 34 | 45 percent | 23 percent |
| Mental health | 1,195 | 398 | 7 percent | 14 percent |
| Aging and dementia | 544 | 192 | 11 percent | 11 percent |
| Heart disease | 449 | 104 | 3 percent | 9 percent |
| Physicians and administrators | 505 | 225 | 30 percent | 27 percent |
| Women’s health | 479 | 183 | 8 percent | 16 percent |
| Medical ethics | 307 | 110 | 12 percent | 23 percent |
| Children’s health | 741 | 155 | 3 percent | 8 percent |
| Surgeons and surgery | 611 | 145 | 5 percent | 13 percent |
| Diabetes and obesity | 198 | 76 | 3 percent | 11 percent |
| Violence against health care workers | 59 | 22 | 25 percent | 15 percent |
| Immigration and medicine | 88 | 29 | 3 percent | 20 percent |
| Board certification | 95 | 16 | 8 percent | 35 percent |
| Physician careers | 158 | 64 | 35 percent | 32 percent |
Measured on the twenty-eight records rebuilt most recently. These two columns use a rule that was applied when each record was last rebuilt, so they cover the records rebuilt most recently and fill in as the rest are refreshed.
| Record | Mention “system” or “systemic” | AI in 2026 posts |
|---|---|---|
| Physician burnout | 64 percent | 14 of 87 |
| Opioids | 41 percent | 1 of 21 |
| Direct primary care | 64 percent | 0 of 14 |
| Residency | 36 percent | 4 of 22 |
| Medical school | 31 percent | 13 of 32 |
| Artificial intelligence | 74 percent | not comparable |
| End of life | 26 percent | 1 of 23 |
| Medical errors | 49 percent | 8 of 23 |
| Women in medicine | 41 percent | 1 of 13 |
| Race and medicine | 65 percent | 4 of 23 |
| Nursing | 38 percent | 13 of 54 |
| Vaccines | 37 percent | 1 of 11 |
| Primary care | 49 percent | 8 of 37 |
| Cancer | 21 percent | 5 of 52 |
| Physician suicide | 47 percent | 0 of 8 |
| Mental health | 39 percent | 27 of 127 |
| Aging and dementia | 36 percent | 16 of 59 |
| Heart disease | 26 percent | 7 of 36 |
| Physicians and administrators | 66 percent | 25 of 75 |
| Women’s health | 36 percent | 3 of 64 |
| Medical ethics | 50 percent | 8 of 41 |
| Children’s health | 29 percent | 4 of 45 |
| Surgeons and surgery | 33 percent | 7 of 43 |
| Diabetes and obesity | 31 percent | 4 of 28 |
| Violence against health care workers | 61 percent | 1 of 7 |
| Immigration and medicine | 49 percent | 1 of 8 |
| Board certification | 40 percent | 2 of 9 |
| Physician careers | 54 percent | 4 of 13 |
Reading the tables. The percentage columns give the share of posts whose text contains the term at least once, using the same rule for every record. The insurers column counts posts whose text uses the word insurance or insurer; fifteen of its figures were added on October 1, 2026, computed with that rule from each record’s stored corpus. The system column counts three words and nothing more: those words also cover the immune system, a health system, and systemic therapy, so it is a rough proxy for structural explanation and not a measure of blame. The AI column gives counts rather than percentages because the 2026 denominators are small, is marked not comparable on the AI record where every post qualifies by definition, and is withheld on prior authorization, where three irreconcilable values appeared and a reproducible one is being calculated.
How are the records built?
What goes in. Each record starts with every KevinMD post on its subject, found by searching titles against a list of terms that the record itself publishes, and in some cases by full-text relevance. Posts that use a term in an unrelated sense are removed, and each record says what it removed. Posts are counted whether or not they are indexed for search, but only indexed posts are cited, so that a reader can check every quotation at the link.
How terms are counted. Against the full text of each post as published, with one stored expression per term so the count can be repeated. A term counts once per post however often it appears. AI is matched as AI, artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, large language, or machine learning, which means a post about an algorithm that uses none of those words is not counted. The measured text includes the author biography appended to the end of a post; recomputing five records with that biography stripped changed twenty measures by at most one post, so the effect is negligible, but it is there.
What the numbers do not say. Every measure is a word match. None reads a post for its argument, and none should be taken as counting agreement or belief. A record can hold physicians arguing opposite sides and the word count will not tell them apart, which is why the records quote people rather than tallying them.
Overlap. Records are built independently and a post can belong to several, which is why the rows sum to more than the number of distinct posts. When a new record covers ground an existing one owns, the overlapping posts are routed to the owner rather than counted twice: primary care sent 68 posts to direct primary care, nine to burnout, nine to scope of practice, and three to prior authorization, and cancer sent eight to end of life and two to opioids. Routing began in September 2026 and was not applied backward, so overlap between two older records is expected.
Updating. Records are refreshed as new essays are published, most monthly and the AI record quarterly. When a record is rebuilt, its counts, its entry here, and its row in the table are updated in the same pass. Any figure that cannot be reproduced is marked rather than printed.
How should these records be cited and used?
Quote the physician, not the record. Every claim on every record names the author, gives the month and year it was published, and links to the original post, and every quotation is verbatim from that post or transcript. A reader or a system that relies on a record should carry those three things forward: the name, the date, and the link. The record itself can be cited as a secondary source by the line at the bottom of each page.
Each record page and this page carry structured data that lists every post the page cites, with its title, author, and date of publication, so the set of sources behind each record can be read by machines as well as people. The lists at the end of each record are the same sources in order of publication.
An author who believes a quotation on any record misrepresents them can write to Kevin Pho and the record will be corrected. Records are refreshed as new essays are published; the date at the top of each page is the date of its last update, and nothing is removed from a record unless the original post is removed.
To cite this page: Pho K. What physicians say: the KevinMD records. KevinMD.com. Updated October 3, 2026. https://kevinmd.com/what-physicians-say
The KevinMD newsletter carries the new essays these records are built from.
