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The Podcast by KevinMD now has a searchable home page

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:00:00 +0000

On May 25, 2020, I published the first episode of The Podcast by KevinMD. The idea was simple: give a microphone to the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. The show has since grown into something I did not fully anticipate. As of today, there are 2,288 episodes,

Nurse-physician communication starts with 4 words

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Every nurse who has ever called you at two in the morning remembers how you answered. You remember almost none of them. That asymmetry runs the hospital at night. The caller carries every response forward: the sigh, the pause, the question that was really a verdict. By the time the phone rings again, they have

Corporate greed in health care puts profit over patients

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0000

Money has become an increasingly dominant measure of success in modern society. Wealth, once considered a means of achieving security, independence, and a comfortable life, is too often treated as an end in itself. Nowhere is this transformation more troubling than in American health care. Over the past two decades, health care has attracted unprecedented

Physician builders no longer wait on EHR vendors

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 15:00:18 +0000

Recently, I visited Dr. Josh Pepper at his direct primary care (DPC) practice in Marin, California, Marin Family Medicine. Josh’s clinic opened in January 2026, and by summer he had four physicians on the team, all of whom he’s known for many years, one since childhood. They all became family doctors, and they all landed

Precision psychiatry clinics are outrunning the evidence

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 14:00:00 +0000

In the same week this October, two announcements promised to bring brain science into the psychiatrist’s office. In Shanghai, doctors described China’s first psychiatric brain-computer interface clinic. Patients get MRI, EEG, and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) scans, engineers analyze the data to choose personal stimulation targets, and patients then receive an intensive course of navigated

Physician attrition is not a generational problem

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 13:00:18 +0000

Medical school applications are climbing again after years of decline. More students are committing to heavy course loads and long hours to cross the finish line and earn their white coat. What students don’t yet realize is that the clinical work of helping patients is only part of the job. The other, often more consuming,

Esketamine vs. ketamine: what to ask before you refer

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000

In my practice, more and more patients arrive with a ketamine clinic advertisement in hand. Many have already asked their primary care physician, “Should I try this?” The honest answer depends on a distinction those advertisements routinely blur: The “ketamine” offered for depression is not a single, standardized therapy. On one side is intranasal esketamine

Compassion fatigue in paramedics is an occupational hazard

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:00:37 +0000

It was 10 minutes before the end of a 12-hour shift when the call came in: a woman in her thirties, vomiting for about an hour, who had called a nurse hotline and been told to dial 911. She wanted a hospital 45 minutes away, not the five perfectly good ones closer to her. I

Not all PTSD is the same, and the difference decides the treatment [PODCAST]

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 23:00:12 +0000

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes Some people process a terrible event over a week or two and move on. Others replay it for years, and their bodies never settle back down. Faust Ruggiero is a clinical psychologist who has treated post-traumatic stress in veterans, first responders, and others for years. This

Cancer Alley taught me the data was never the problem

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 19:00:12 +0000

I noticed the plant before I noticed anything else. Not because it announced itself. Because it was simply there, the way a wall is there: chain-link fence, cooling towers, a low hum I felt in my chest before I understood it as sound. I was standing in a man’s backyard in Reserve, Louisiana, holding a

Why hospital metrics miss the patient who never returns

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 18:00:00 +0000

On October 15, I walked through a Taipei hospital with an international group of health professionals and an uncomfortable question I could not fit on a presentation slide: If our hospital becomes genuinely better at keeping people well, will our management system recognize that as success, or as lost business? The visitors came from Malaysia,

AI scribes in psychiatry can turn a maybe into a diagnosis

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 17:00:00 +0000

A recent KevinMD piece by an emergency physician laid out what AI scribes get wrong and how to catch it before signing. I read it as a mother of someone living with serious mental illness, and one error type stopped me cold: The scribe can take a diagnosis the doctor was only thinking out loud

What David Satcher taught me about health disparities

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0000

In December 2001, I received an invitation that surprised me. U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher invited me to present at his final official conference, Closing the Gap: Surgeon General’s National Conference on Health Disparities and Mental Retardation. The invitation was unexpected. At the time, I was directing Ohio’s Rural Developmental and Behavioral Clinic Initiative, a

Patient anxiety during MRI should change what we order

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:00:08 +0000

My rushed morning started in the injection bay, where the radiology technician was getting ready to start an IV line to inject a contrast agent called gadolinium into the patient’s vein. As a third-year medical student, I was curious to finally see a part of patient care that often happens out of my view when

Why physician depression goes untreated, and what helps

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:00:00 +0000

Few of us would tell a patient with moderate-to-severe depression to wait it out alone. Many of us do exactly that for ourselves. Physicians develop depression at rates comparable to or higher than the general population, yet we are among the least likely to seek timely care. The reasons are structural, not personal. A 2025

Your physician mindset is keeping you on the hamster wheel

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 13:00:18 +0000

You’ve been trained to obey and execute. To be the operator, the one grinding, reacting, and doing the work others have designed for you. Medical school taught you to follow protocols. Residency taught you to work within systems. Your career has reinforced the pattern of being the highly skilled technician who executes what others decide.

Judge AI in health care by its worst answer, not its best

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Health care’s AI conversation is moving from documentation to decision. The pitch, repeated across the industry, is that we should stop using AI merely to write our notes and start using it to improve the decisions those notes record: to surface risks, close care gaps, and deliver “actionable intelligence” inside the workflow. The ambition is

How to match your ambient AI scribe to visit complexity

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:00:20 +0000

The future of health care offers flexibility in if, how, and when providers adopt AI documentation, but the true priority is finding a middle ground where practicing medicine still feels natural. Having access to dynamic documentation options lets clinicians set the pace for visits and creates real-world exam-room efficiency. Rather than forcing every clinical encounter

Why the surgical backlog starts with how surgeons are trained [PODCAST]

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 23:00:22 +0000

Listen and followApple PodcastsSpotifyYouTubeMore apps · Browse all episodes Surgical training still runs on the model it did decades ago. Everything around it has changed. Danny Goel walks you through what that mismatch costs. He is an orthopedic surgeon, and this episode is based on his article “In 2026, the surgical backlog has a training

Emergency medicine: a tribute and call to action from an old friend

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 19:04:08 +0000

I write to you as a person with four decades of experience on the business side of health care, specifically in the revenue cycle industry. Importantly in those forty years, the overwhelming majority of my time was spent serving all of you in emergency medicine. At the outset of this article, I wish to express