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She spent weeks on her personal statement. Then someone asked why she didn’t use AI. [PODCAST]

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 23:00:29 +0000

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! A resident read a student’s personal statement and asked why she didn’t just use ChatGPT. The comment landed like a wound. In this episode, certified coach and professor Kathleen Muldoon returns to unpack what a residency personal statement is actually for,

Not medically necessary: the three words that cost me $9,000

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:00:48 +0000

Last summer I received a $9,000 bill for an overnight hospital stay that I probably could have done without, medically speaking. It started two days earlier, when I went in for a prostate biopsy. Mind you, this was my third biopsy and each one, including this one, turned out to be negative. Nevertheless, my doctor

GLP-1 weight regain: We are funding the wrong half

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:00:39 +0000

I have some version of the same conversation every week now. A patient is starting semaglutide or tirzepatide, and partway through the visit they ask the question I suspect most of us are hearing constantly: What happens if I ever stop? For a while I gave the honest-but-incomplete answer, that we’d cross that bridge when

Is chronic stroke recovery really capped at 6 months?

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:00:58 +0000

For decades, stroke survivors have been told the same thing: Whatever function you haven’t recovered in six months, you likely never will. That assumption is now being dismantled. The American Stroke Association estimates that 1 in 4 American adults will experience stroke in their lifetime, often with devastating consequences. The 2011-2018 National Health and Nutrition

Is chatbot sycophancy dangerous for psychotic patients?

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:00:26 +0000

When a chatbot agrees with something false, it rarely has to lie to do it. That’s the finding from a new MIT-affiliated study modeling how sycophancy compounds over a conversation. Researchers built a Bayesian simulation running 10,000 conversations across 11 levels of chatbot agreeableness. At the highest sycophancy setting, roughly half of simulated users ended

What maternity care deserts cost a town

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:00:03 +0000

Today, less than half of rural hospitals in the U.S. still offer labor and delivery services, and since 2020, 139 of them have stopped delivering babies altogether. That is usually treated as a public health statistic. It is also an economic one. Each closure does not just push expectant mothers into longer drives to the

What maternity care deserts cost a town originally appeared in KevinMD.com.

The question doctors on social media should ask first

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:00:58 +0000

It sounds like a ridiculous question. Until you’re a doctor with a social media following and you know the parents of the child you’re worried about are watching. Before COVID, I loved the spontaneous, ridiculous moments that broke up the intensity of hospital life. Flash mobs with nurses. Dancing with OR staff. Laughing with ICU

Alzheimer’s paranoia and the gun nobody locked up

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:00:34 +0000

They met in the U.S. Army and fell in love instantly. Though they went their separate paths, they both had brief but failed marriages and then reunited. It was a second marriage for both of them as they muddled through their previous baggage from their first marriages. He was a captain in the Army, 6

Maternal mental health and the myth of endurance

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:00:56 +0000

I’d really like to talk with my fellow women. There is a courtroom in Plymouth, Massachusetts where a jury is deciding whether a mother is criminally responsible for the deaths of her three children. This mother was a labor and delivery nurse. She had a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and an eight-month-old. Her defense says she

Why employer-sponsored insurance fails your employees

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:00:49 +0000

Halfway through our dry run, we paused in the boardroom of a national health insurance company. Talking points refined. Slides polished. Empty chairs at empty tables, staring back at us. I didn’t linger on the silence then. Now, as a medical student, I cannot escape it. Because empty chairs look different here. Perhaps, they reflect

Why overdiagnosis is failing the students it claims to help [PODCAST]

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:00:25 +0000

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! At one university, the share of students receiving disability accommodations rose sevenfold in a decade. Is that progress? In this episode, health care educator and patient advocate Richard A. Lawhern argues that psychiatric overdiagnosis is handicapping the very students it aims

How a failed driving test shook my confidence in medicine

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:00:11 +0000

I had been driving for fourteen years before I moved to the United Kingdom two years ago. Back home in Malaysia, driving had become almost instinctive. It was something I rarely thought about. But moving countries meant starting over. To continue working as a community psychiatry registrar, I needed a U.K. driving license. Twice I

Why do physicians freeze with LGBTQ+ patients?

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 19:00:49 +0000

“Doc, your next patient is nonbinary.” I say some version of this to physicians when I teach about LGBTQ+ affirming care, then ask, “What is the first thought that comes to mind?” The responses come quickly: “I freeze.” “Oh, God. We were never taught that.” “I don’t know what to say.” “I don’t want to

Why do physicians freeze with LGBTQ+ patients? originally appeared in KevinMD.com.

Why AI governance in health care cannot be backdated

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:00:12 +0000

On July 29, Hackensack Meridian Health became the first health system in the country to earn The Joint Commission’s Responsible Use of AI in Health Care certification. Most coverage treated it as a milestone for one New Jersey network. I read it as a deadline for everyone else, because of a single question that certification

Why ambient AI scribe notes fail the 2026 CMS audit

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 15:00:47 +0000

The 2026 clinical landscape is witnessing a profound documentation paradox. While ambient AI scribes are celebrated for reducing “pajama time,” new data suggests they may be creating a systemic Attestation Gap. Research published in JAMA Network Open found that burnout prevalence dropped from 51.9 percent to 38.8 percent after the adoption of ambient tools, but

Are peptides safe? What the evidence actually shows

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:00:42 +0000

Peptides are rapidly becoming one of the most talked-about developments in modern medicine. They are being positioned as solutions for weight loss, muscle recovery, anti-aging, skin health, and overall performance. Patients are increasingly arriving at appointments with detailed questions about specific compounds, often influenced by social media, wellness clinics, and direct-to-consumer marketing. At a foundational

The grief health care workers carry after maternal death

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:00:49 +0000

She was a young mother. We had never met her before. She arrived gasping for air. Within moments, the room was full. Everyone came together with one purpose, to save her. Then her heart stopped. CPR began immediately. The obstetric team delivered the baby while compressions continued. Thirty minutes passed. No pulse. We kept going.

Student loans are not blocking your practice ownership

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 21:00:41 +0000

Clinicians are trained to demand certainty before they act. In the operatory or the exam room, that risk-averse instinct is exactly what keeps patients safe. Applied to career decisions, the same instinct becomes one of the most expensive habits in modern health care. There is a sentence I hear almost every week from young clinicians,

The buyer is not the user in electronic health records

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:00:41 +0000

I have practiced medicine for more than three decades, thirty years of obstetrics and gynecology, and now addiction medicine. For seventeen of those years, I have worked inside electronic medical records that waste my time, interrupt my thinking, and stand between me and the person in front of me. Like a lot of clinicians, I

The physician disposability nobody wants to name

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:00:43 +0000

I am writing this from the slow, disciplined landscape of recovery (one repaired shoulder, one sling, and one unrepairable truth): Medicine did not suddenly become fragile when AI arrived. It did not suddenly become threatened when APRNs and NPs expanded their scope. It did not suddenly become replaceable in the twenty-first century. Medicine became fragile