KevinMD.com

Moral injury in medicine goes beyond simple burnout

Thu, 14 May 2026 12:00:53 +0000

Most young physicians enter medicine with a sincere desire to help people. They expect long hours, difficult training, and personal sacrifice. What many do not expect is how profoundly the environment around them will shape not only how they practice medicine, but who they become. Medicine teaches many things that never appear on a syllabus.

Why clinical ethics and medical law demand your attention

Thu, 14 May 2026 11:00:25 +0000

Most clinicians give little thought to ethics and law until something goes wrong. This is understandable. They are immersed in concrete clinical tasks, ordering tests, reading reports, examining patients, and running clinics. Ethics can feel abstract and legal rules distant from daily practice. As an ethicist and trial attorney, I see the consequences of ethical

One silly mistake can sabotage your medical career before it starts [PODCAST]

Wed, 13 May 2026 23:00:16 +0000

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! What if the biggest threat to your success in medical training has nothing to do with how much you study? Vance Lehman, professor of neuroradiology and chief of neuroradiology education at the Mayo Clinic, spent over two years researching why capable

Symptoms with normal labs deserve a better question

Wed, 13 May 2026 21:00:47 +0000

She sat across from me, results in hand, and asked the question I have heard more times than I can count. “If everything is normal, why do I still feel like this?” I did not have a clean answer. Not because she was wrong to ask. Because she was right, and medicine, at that moment,

Can clonal hematopoiesis improve blood cancer screening?

Wed, 13 May 2026 19:00:24 +0000

On November 22, 2025, Tatiana Schlossberg, a 35-year-old journalist and the daughter of Caroline Kennedy, announced that she was dying from a rare and particularly aggressive form of blood cancer called acute myeloid leukemia (AML). In a heart-wrenching essay in The New Yorker, she described having been diagnosed with the disease just a few hours

International medical graduates need real protections

Wed, 13 May 2026 18:00:16 +0000

In 2019, I completed my medical training in Russia and arrived in the United States as a Fulbright Scholar. My award carried the U.S. president’s personal signature, a powerful welcome to a country I saw as a place of opportunity, freedom, and cultural exchange. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime honor that most foreign physicians can

Why psychiatric medications often fail autistic patients

Wed, 13 May 2026 17:00:41 +0000

In clinical practice, it is not uncommon for autistic patients to arrive after years of treatment with a firm conclusion: Psychiatric medications do not work for them. This belief is typically built on multiple medication trials, inconsistent benefit, and often significant side effects. But the conclusion itself may be misleading. What is often being observed

Missed claims filing deadlines threaten patient care

Wed, 13 May 2026 16:00:57 +0000

I used to think health care finance was mostly about numbers. Then I worked inside the financial operations of a health care organization and realized how much patient care depends on systems most people never see. One experience has stayed with me ever since. A claim for care that had already been provided was sitting

Point-of-care ultrasound transforms emergency medicine

Wed, 13 May 2026 15:00:57 +0000

Emergency medicine is exciting, at least, that is the story we tell. It is so exciting that there are entire television (TV) shows built around it. Resuscitations, critical illness. And medical mysteries we get the first crack at solving. That is what draws people in. It is what drew me in. But the truth is,

Health outcomes rely on more than just health care

Wed, 13 May 2026 14:00:58 +0000

If the quality of health care was the only major determining factor of health outcomes, then the healthiest cities in the U.S. would simply be those with the best health care facilities. Recent national rankings of city health status, based on composite measures of health care access, food environment, physical activity, and built infrastructure, reveal

Medical malpractice risks persist even after saving a life

Wed, 13 May 2026 13:00:25 +0000

It is 2:17 a.m. in a crowded emergency room. A patient is rushed in. The patient is unconscious, unstable, and rapidly deteriorating. There is no time to obtain a detailed medical history, no opportunity for a careful discussion of risks, and obviously no time to seek consent. The doctor decides to take immediate action which

Nursing violence causes silent and painful cumulative stress

Wed, 13 May 2026 12:00:45 +0000

There is a part of nursing we do not talk about. Not in school. Not in orientation. Not even with each other most of the time. It is the part where you learn to function in environments where violence, whether real or threatened, becomes part of the job. And over time, you start to notice

Aesthetic medicine needs stronger scientific evidence

Wed, 13 May 2026 11:00:27 +0000

There is a quiet but growing discomfort among physicians working at the intersection of clinical care and aesthetic medicine. It is not about technique. It is not about patient demand. It is about something more fundamental: the pace at which practice is evolving compared to the pace at which evidence is being produced. Over the

You can’t stent a capillary: Why aging starts in your smallest blood vessels [PODCAST]

Tue, 12 May 2026 23:00:34 +0000

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! What if the real driver of aging isn’t your mitochondria or your telomeres but the tiny capillaries you never think about? Double board-certified emergency and internal medicine physician Kenneth Ro returns to the show to make a compelling case that microvascular

Psychiatric polypharmacy is a reassessment failure

Tue, 12 May 2026 20:00:08 +0000

The 72-year-old woman sitting in front of me had spent nearly a decade anxious. Not ordinary stress, not fleeting worry, but the kind of chronic physiologic anxiety that hijacks sleep, amplifies rumination, tightens the chest, and slowly shrinks a person’s world. For over eight years, she had been treated with escalating doses of bupropion, eventually

Doctors with mental illness need our care, not silence

Tue, 12 May 2026 19:00:36 +0000

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025). What follows is a slightly edited narrative, the story of Kieran Allen, MD. Dr. Allen is from Australia, a psychiatry resident (registrar) at the time of writing. Dr. Allen writes from a different perspective, that of someone with a relapsing and

Primary care access is the real problem, not the system

Tue, 12 May 2026 18:00:34 +0000

Primary care is often described as broken, but that diagnosis misses the real issue. The clinical foundation remains strong. The problem lies in how access to care is designed and delivered. Primary care isn’t broken; access is. People can manage nearly every aspect of their lives instantly through technology, yet health care still relies on

Physician autonomy and the hidden curriculum of medicine

Tue, 12 May 2026 17:00:01 +0000

If you are a physician, you have likely heard the question: “What would you do?” Increasingly, the answer is shaped before you have the chance to speak. Patients assume that the physician responsible for their care is the one making the decisions. In many cases, that assumption no longer holds. Modern health care is organized

A Medicare for All alternative that keeps insurers in

Tue, 12 May 2026 16:00:03 +0000

An excerpt from Beyond Medicare For All: Cracking the Code of the Healthcare Affordability Crisis. If our goal is high-quality, comprehensive, affordable health care for all, we must make health care less profitable. If health systems and corporations continue to control health care and their main goal is profit, health costs will continue to rise

Unexplained symptoms require deeper medical curiosity

Tue, 12 May 2026 15:00:25 +0000

I am 75 years old, and I can see perfectly. My vision is 20/20. The tests are normal. The symptom is not. The disturbance is monocular, dynamic, and light-based, not structural, not degenerative in any way that current imaging captures. And yet, every day, I see the world through a veil of intrusive light that