Physician

Symptoms with normal labs deserve a better question

Physician

May 13, 2026

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, had run out of language.

Her CBC was normal. Her CMP was normal. Thyroid unremarkable. Inflammatory markers unimpressive. …

International medical graduates need real protections

Vasilii Khammad, MD, PhD

Physician

May 13, 2026

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 only dream of. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. In early 2020, while still in the …

Point-of-care ultrasound transforms emergency medicine

Joshua Guttman, MD

Physician

May 13, 2026

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, real emergency medicine does not look like television. After medical school and residency, after the …

Health outcomes rely on more than just health care

Jalene Jacob, MD, MBA

Physician

May 13, 2026

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 a different reality. The cities that perform best are those where health is structurally …

Doctors with mental illness need our care, not silence

Michael F. Myers, MD

Physician

May 12, 2026

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 remitting mental illness. He focuses on this for the …

Primary care access is the real problem, not the system

Payam Zamani, MD

Physician

May 12, 2026

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 outdated models that require patients to wait days or even weeks for routine care. This creates frustration …

Physician vs. provider is an ethics issue, not just style

American College of Physicians

Physician

May 12, 2026

A position paper about using the term physician instead of provider? What does this have to do with biomedical ethics?

I fully support calling ourselves physicians and not providers, and have been sensitive to this issue in part thanks to Read more…

Physician vs. provider is an ethics issue, not just style

Expanding the SOAP framework boosts health outcomes

Deepak Gupta, MD and Sarwan Kumar, MD

Physician

May 11, 2026

The Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan (SOAP) framework could be expanded beyond clinical care to also address patients’ financial and legal well-being. This would require training health care providers in basic financial and legal principles, establishing dedicated financial-legal departments within health care institutions, and potentially offering financial and legal services as add-ons to health care insurance. With these changes, routine health care encounters could become more comprehensive, addressing socioeconomic needs …

How to navigate physician job loss in the first week

Patrick Hudson, MD

Physician

May 11, 2026

A generation ago, most physicians barely considered the possibility of suddenly losing a job.

The profession was not perfectly stable, of course. Doctors still burned out, practices failed, partnerships fractured, and hospitals behaved badly from time to time. But for many physicians there remained an underlying assumption that competence and hard work created a reasonably durable professional life. If you trained well, treated patients properly, maintained your reputation, and kept your …

Physician burnout is a heavy burden for many healers

Moses Kim, MD

Physician

May 11, 2026

I am a former vascular surgeon, and I left the field in 2020 at the height of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) due to burnout. And though I had not been well for some years, I was able to find myself again and rediscover my passion for music. In the end, my health and my family became my priority, so currently I work in a more stable outpatient clinical setting.

I started …

Dehumanization in medicine: the language of disposition

Aditya Singh, MD

Physician

May 10, 2026

As a second-year internal medicine resident, I had an unexpected epiphany during my geriatrics rotation, not amid the chaos of a bustling hospital, but within the reflective calm of a rehabilitation facility.

As I walked into the room of a long-term care patient recovering after a stroke, there was a man in front of me who was wheelchair-bound and visibly distressed. His speech was difficult to understand, but as I listened …

Physician burnout is not a failure of resilience

Gus W. Krucke, MD

Physician

May 10, 2026

There comes a point in medicine when knowledge, effort, and goodwill are no longer enough to explain why someone keeps going.

Most people enter medical training with a purpose so obvious it barely needs words. Suffering exists. Skill can help. The work matters.

Then training tests that belief. The test rarely comes as one dramatic moment. It comes through accumulation: criticism without context, responsibility before confidence, long hours, grief carried quietly, and …

Rebuilding patient trust when medical advice is resisted

Fabrizia Faustinella, MD, PhD

Physician

May 10, 2026

I would like to share with readers a story about a clinical encounter that challenged my ability to build trust amid fear and misunderstanding. As a practicing physician and medical educator, I have long been drawn to the emotional and ethical dimensions of patient care. While the story itself is not unique, it captures a recurring tension in our work, the gap that can emerge between clinical expertise and patient …

Women physicians’ health is paying the price of medicine

Jessie Mahoney, MD

Physician

May 9, 2026

I knew from the beginning that something was wrong in the culture of medicine, but I never believed it would almost kill me. This is not a story about my health. It’s a story about why my health story is not unusual. I hope it becomes a call to action.

I grew up in Berkeley, where speaking up is a developmental milestone. Early in my medical training, I started asking questions. …

Uber’s personal injury lawsuits split doctors and lawyers

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Physician

May 9, 2026

As a practicing physician who also specializes in caring for patients injured in motor vehicle accidents, I’ve seen firsthand how complex and emotionally charged these situations can be. Over the years, I’ve treated people with devastating, life-changing injuries from crashes, as well as those with subtler but still very real problems like persistent pain, spinal issues, or concussions that develop over time. At the same time, I’ve witnessed the intricate …

How corporate medicine is eroding truth and patient dignity

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

May 9, 2026

The first time I received care as a patient in academic medicine, I felt something I did not fully appreciate until years later: safety. Not just clinical safety, but moral safety, the sense that the people caring for me were operating inside a culture that valued truth, transparency, and professional integrity. When I practiced and taught in academic medicine, I was surrounded by colleagues who believed, almost instinctively, that honesty …

A touching story of patient gratitude and a dozen eggs

Dr. Damane Zehra

Physician

May 8, 2026

I was in a deep sleep when my phone rang. I looked around; it was still dark. For a moment, I thought it was my alarm, but it was only 5 a.m. It was not the alarm after all. Instead, it was a phone call from an unknown number. I answered it, and to my surprise, it was a patient I had seen in the clinic the previous week. She …

The medical case for teaching kindness in early childhood development

Paul Dranichnikov, MD, PhD

Physician

May 8, 2026

As a physician, I encounter humanity at its most unguarded. I have held trembling hands, delivered devastating news, and witnessed emotions stripped of pretense. In exam rooms and hospital corridors, patterns emerge with unsettling consistency. Under stress, fear, or pain, humans default to self-protection. We become impatient. Defensive. Sometimes cruel. Not because we are irredeemable, but because survival instincts speak loudly when vulnerability is exposed. Kindness, by contrast, does not …

How medical malpractice cases reveal health care system flaws

Howard Smith, MD

Physician

May 7, 2026

Again, I must discuss two cases of medical malpractice which I feel best demonstrate the quagmire our health care system finds itself in. One is a medical malpractice case against a hospital. It follows that this case also has a merit of only 33.48 percent. Nevertheless, there is a legal strategy that tips the scale by not permitting testimony discussing conditions occurring in another country, where the first 17 …

Why we must fix our fragmented health care system architecture

Vance Alm, MD

Physician

May 7, 2026

Last year I watched a patient of mine, I will call him Raymond, navigate what should have been a straightforward referral to cardiology. He had insurance. Good insurance. The kind politicians point to when they say the system is working. It took 11 weeks, four phone calls, two prior authorizations, and one emergency department (ED) visit to get him seen. He was not uninsured. He was not poor. He was …

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