KevinMD.com

Nurses are getting assaulted at work and no one listens [PODCAST]

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 23:00:55 +0000

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! A nurse survived a violent assault at work, then watched her hospital treat her like a liability, not a victim. In this episode, June Garen, a retired psychiatric and operating room nurse and author, and Carleigh Beriont, a former union organizer

Why using AI to write articles needs an audit trail

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:00:38 +0000

Not long ago, I wrote a Sensible Medicine article about AI called “I invented a headache to test AI and here is what I found.” I concluded that for diagnosing my headache (and a few other conditions), AI got things wrong quite often. When given full history of my problem, it did well, but a

Medicine keeps treating oral health as someone else’s job

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:00:01 +0000

During my years in clinical dentistry, I repeatedly met patients whose oral disease had been causing symptoms long before they reached a dental office. Some had mentioned bleeding gums to another health care professional but did not understand that the symptom required evaluation. Others had lived with painful chewing, loose teeth, or persistent dry mouth

Medical misinformation arrives before the physician does

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:00:16 +0000

An excerpt from Medicine Versus Politics: Three Tales of Patient Survival. Deception has always been a weapon, but in our time it has become a system. In medicine especially, where facts should be the most trusted currency, lies can wound as surely as disease itself. Repetition, amplification, and manipulation turn rumor into “truth” at a frightening

Clinical judgment is what turns information into medicine

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:00:54 +0000

Medicine has always evolved Every generation of physicians has witnessed change. New instruments replaced older ones. New imaging techniques revealed what could once only be imagined. Laboratory medicine became increasingly accurate. Minimally invasive procedures reduced recovery times. Digital records replaced paper files. Today, artificial intelligence is beginning to assist physicians in ways that seemed impossible

What ethics education owes students when evidence changes

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:00:16 +0000

Ethics education differs from other disciplines because its main goal is not to transmit information but to encourage moral reasoning. When students leave an ethics course, we hope they will be better equipped to analyze competing values, evaluate evidence, and justify their conclusions, not merely adopt those of the instructor. When you think about it,

Tobacco harm reduction changes the talk with your doctor

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:00:33 +0000

Until recently people who smoke cigarettes were presented with a simple choice: continue smoking and worsen the risk and severity of tobacco-related disease or make another quit attempt. The doctor would ask, “Do you believe that you are ready to quit smoking?” Both doctor and patient would be relieved when the answer was “no.” The

How specialists can handle difficult patients

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:00:09 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to speak with a group of neurogastroenterologists who practice at a major referral center. These specialty physicians treat people with complex digestive disorders such as gastroparesis, abnormal motility, and irritable bowel disease. They also treat patients with illnesses categorized as “functional gastrointestinal disorders,” where no specific physical or lab abnormality

How specialists can handle difficult patients originally appeared in KevinMD.com.

Adult-onset ADHD is a naming problem, not a new disorder

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:00:52 +0000

“I’ve never really been able to focus, but it’s only become a real problem in the last few years, since I started this job. Could I be evaluated for adult ADHD?” I hear a version of this request often, and it captures a confusion built into the term itself. “Adult ADHD” sounds like it names

Dance and brain health: a physician’s prescription

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:00:37 +0000

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by silence? I think about those questions often as

Why doctors should read fiction, not just research papers

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:00:50 +0000

A randomized controlled trial can tell us that a treatment reduces mortality by a measurable percentage. It cannot tell us what it feels like to receive that treatment, to wait for its results, or to watch someone you love decide whether to accept it. That gap, between what medicine measures and what patients actually experience,

Gratitude in medicine: the people who carried me

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:00:48 +0000

Reason I find that this exercise of thanking and expressing gratitude makes my journey to the land of the unknown joyful. I thought I should do this when I have a clear mind and good health. I am teaching the residents now to understand its value. I am writing this now so that I am

Burnout blames the doctor for a broken system [PODCAST]

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 23:00:25 +0000

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes! What if burnout is the wrong word for what doctors are actually going through? Gus W. Krucke argues that calling physicians burned out treats a systemic failure as a personal one, and that physicians are not failing, they are grieving a

Tele-critical care today is not what the studies actually tested

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:00:53 +0000

In an early 2026 piece, I criticized the growing practice of outsourcing bedside ICU care to tele-critical care programs. I argued that replacing the in-person work of physicians, nurse practitioners (NPs), and physician assistants (PAs) with remote physicians leads to the lack of a bedside leader, shoddy exams, breaks in the continuity of care, the depersonalization of the

GLP-1 weight rebound: We have seen this before

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:00:11 +0000

We are living through a massive, rapid shift in how we approach human health, and as I watch the excitement surrounding the new generation of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonists, I can’t help but see a familiar ghost in the room. It feels exactly like the early days of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) revolution,

GLP-1 weight rebound: We have seen this before originally appeared in KevinMD.com.

Why pre-Roe abortion stories matter again after Dobbs

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:00:01 +0000

History has a way of repeating itself. In the years leading up to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, many women in their seventies, eighties, and nineties still remembered what life was like before Roe v. Wade. They remembered the hidden abortions, the whispered conversations, and the unspoken secrets. A handful of films (including If

Shifting health care toward prevention, not just treatment

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:00:02 +0000

Health care has never possessed more scientific knowledge, more sophisticated technology, or more specialized expertise than it does today. Yet despite these remarkable advances, chronic disease continues to rise, health care costs continue to escalate, physician burnout persists, and patients increasingly spend more years living with illness rather than enjoying health. This paradox raises an

MIPS reporting in 2026 is an operations problem first

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:00:33 +0000

Most independent practices treat the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) as a clinical-quality program with a billing-side tax. That framing misreads the decision. MIPS participation is mostly an operational question: whether the practice has the data infrastructure, EHR capability, and vendor support to clear the performance threshold, and whether the dollar exposure of skipping is

How clinicians find recovery from gaslighting

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:00:26 +0000

I work with many victims of gaslighting around the country. We learn from each other. Those who have lost their licenses to work can follow these steps to regain their licenses and resume their careers. First, acknowledge that any victim of gaslighting suffers some degree of PTSD. Severe gaslighting leads to complex PTSD. The federal

How clinicians find recovery from gaslighting originally appeared in KevinMD.com.

Extreme heat and psychiatric symptoms: a clinical warning

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:00:05 +0000

Earlier this summer, I wrote about “summer SAD,” the very real worsening of mood, anxiety, agitation, and sleep that some people experience during the hottest and brightest months of the year. After this weekend, I think the conversation needs to go further. Temperatures in the Sacramento area have exceeded 100°F, and over the past several