Physician

When a patient attacks you, it changes your life

Physician

June 11, 2026

I did not intend to visit an emotionally dark place. But now I think I was destined to be there, to maybe find some light.

Recently, I began a literature review of articles on workplace aggression toward mental health clinicians. It was meant to be a routine process. Instead, I became focused on research exploring how workplace violence fundamentally changes people, and how, for some, perceptions of self and others are …

Rural health care delivery is not a coverage problem

Vance Alm, MD

Physician

June 11, 2026

Earl Haskell doesn’t exist. But thousands of patients exactly like him do. They live in counties where the nearest hospital is more than an hour away. Where the local clinic closed years ago. Where a chest pain isn’t just a symptom, it’s a logistical problem. Earl is a composite. His reality is not.

He lives in Loving County, Texas, the least populated county in the United States. On a map, it …

The one question that measures physician integrity

Dr. Saad S. Alshohaib

Physician

June 9, 2026

There comes a night, somewhere near the end of a long career, when a physician sits alone with himself after the corridors have emptied and the pagers have gone quiet. He turns the years over in his mind, the patients who lived and the ones who did not, the diagnoses made in time and the ones missed, the easy hours and the impossible ones, and he discovers that the question …

3 Air Force leadership lessons from three commanders

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

June 9, 2026

During my Air Force years, I served under three commanders with three very different personalities. One was methodical and procedural. One was operational and instinctive. One was strategic and future-focused. They disagreed about many things, but they agreed about one: they wanted to retain me. All three wrote it in my Officer Evaluation Reports (OERs).

At the time, I didn’t think much about it. I was young, busy, and focused on …

Narrative medicine is what AI in medicine cannot replace

Muhammad Mohsin Fareed, MD

Physician

June 9, 2026

Something that I had been resisting tacitly for a while, eventually happened last week. As I was supposed to be all ears towards a patient, my concentration drifted towards the screen. The cursor blinked, translating his words into codes the system would accept as symptoms, durations, and checkboxes. When I looked back at him, he ebbed. The story had been interrupted, and I wasn’t sure I could retrieve it.

Modern medicine …

The attention economy is starving public health

Paul Dranichnikov, MD, PhD

Physician

June 8, 2026

We are living in an era where attention, not information, is the scarce resource. And what we pay attention to (not what we claim to value) reveals the architecture of our priorities.

Consider a few comparisons that, though deliberately absurd, tell a deeper truth. We now have more Marvel movies than major classes of antibiotics. The world produces more aspiring pop singers than there are widely used chemotherapy regimens. Strangely enough, …

Physician burnout is not the whole diagnosis

Gus W. Krucke, MD

Physician

June 7, 2026

Reason for consultation

Burnout. Workforce decline. Moral distress. Concern regarding physician formation.

Chief complaint

Burnout.

History of present illness

Medicine presents with burnout. Chronic. Recurrent. Poorly responsive to treatment.

Associated symptoms now include workforce shortages, declining interest in primary care, moral distress, loss of meaning, and concern regarding what kind of people the profession is forming.

Treatment efforts have been substantial. Wellness initiatives. Resilience training. Mindfulness. Workflow redesign. Administrative intervention. Repeated attempts to improve work-life balance. Partial …

Physician advocacy can close the gap between appointments

Samantha Jackson Dilts, MD

Physician

June 7, 2026

My father’s melanoma diagnosis arrived on a Tuesday. By Thursday, we had a plan of care. By the following Monday, I was back at work seeing my own patients, pretending the world had resumed its normal shape. But it hadn’t. Not really. Because his cancer didn’t pause between appointments, didn’t stop growing or spreading, and neither did the fear, the questions, or the quiet unraveling that comes with navigating a …

Medical hierarchy is silencing young doctors who want to write

Dr. Buga Charles George Kenyi

Physician

June 6, 2026

When people wear hierarchy as a badge of honor, they literally stunt the growth of young doctors, especially in settings where resources are already limited.

I graduated from the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, Cuba in 2023, and have since returned home to serve my community. I am the first doctor from my village of Logwerle, Central Equatoria State, South Sudan, East Africa, and the first to speak four …

Why military patients carry pain a chart can’t explain

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

June 6, 2026

He came to me with chronic neck pain and headaches that would not quit. The diagnosis was already there: neck pain, degenerative disc disease, chronic headaches. But a diagnosis is not the same thing as a story.

We built a sports medicine treatment plan around what I could find on exam: trigger point injections, massage, soft tissue work. The pain would improve, then return. Every four weeks became every two because …

Leaving medicine is a translation problem, not a loss

Shveta Gupta, MD, MBA

Physician

June 6, 2026

At 6:41 on a Tuesday morning, a physician sits in the hospital parking garage after a long shift and reads an email on her phone three times. “We would love to understand how your clinical background translates to this role.” She has been a physician for twenty years. She has taken care of septic children at 2 a.m. She has told families their child won’t make it. She has built …

When a divorce ends a physician’s career

Donald J. Murphy, MD

Physician

June 5, 2026

Anyone who has been gaslit knows it feels like hell on earth. We might as well be soldiers in a foreign war. When we return from the war of gaslighting, we deal with PTSD. Eventually, we feel the healing of the wounds.

I am one of thousands of victims of gaslighting in Colorado. All victims have unique stories. In pursuing justice for many of these victims, I’ve learned that lawyers, judges, …

Military sports medicine and the cost of readiness

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

June 5, 2026

I came to military medicine as a sports medicine physician. At first, it seemed like an unexpected place for that training. But the more soldiers I treated, the more obvious it became: What better place for sports medicine than the military?

Sports medicine is built around performance, load, recovery, rehabilitation, and preserving function over time. In military medicine, the language changes but the principles are the same. Return to sport becomes …

When medicine confuses professionalism vs. compliance

Gus W. Krucke, MD

Physician

June 4, 2026

Medicine changes in many ways. Some changes arrive with public debate, policy announcements, and formal declarations of progress. Others arrive more quietly, through repetition, habit, and the slow accumulation of what becomes normal. In my experience, the most consequential changes in professional life often come that second way. They are absorbed long before they are named.

We speak often of the hidden curriculum in training. Young physicians learn not only science …

Leaving insurance-based practice while burned out is a trap

Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, MD

Physician

June 4, 2026

During and after the pandemic, I was actively looking for a non-clinical position. Despite my love of medicine and two decades as a partner in a busy, prestigious OB/GYN private practice, I would have left clinical medicine entirely if the right opportunity had come along. That is how depleted I was. That is how broken the system had become for me.

It didn’t come along. Eventually, I stopped waiting for an …

How a self-driving car medical escort could work

Deepak Gupta, MD

Physician

June 3, 2026

Ensuring a patient escort has long been a standard safety requirement for discharge after outpatient anesthesia. The rule is increasingly difficult to satisfy for patients who live alone. Even when a loner patient can arrange for someone to closely oversee them at home until the effects of anesthesia have completely worn off, which is generally presumed to be a 24-hour period after administration, they cannot always ensure someone to physically …

Psychedelics in psychiatry are not a neural reset

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

June 3, 2026

The history of psychiatry is often a story of our own impatience. When we look back at the era of the ice-pick lobotomy, we tend to view it as a distant, primitive horror. But if we look closer, the impulse behind it remains very much alive. It was the dream of the “quick fix,” the belief that if we could just physically alter the brain, we could bypass the messy, …

Finding meaning in medicine at a career’s quiet edge

Susan MacLellan-Tobert, MD

Physician

June 2, 2026

There are experiences that do not ask to be understood right away. They ask to be felt.

On Teshima Island in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan, tucked quietly away from the rhythm of daily life, sits Les Archives du Cœur, The Heart Archive, by Christian Boltanski. It is, in essence, a collection of heartbeats. Thousands of them, recorded, stored, and offered back into the world as sound, light, and memory. …

What happened when I brought faith into medicine

Francisco M. Torres, MD

Physician

June 2, 2026

There is a topic that has been avoided since the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment in medical discourse. Nothing to do with diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment protocols, but about the invisible human nature that holds patients together when science runs out of answers. That conversation is about faith.

I personally did not have it for a long time. For most of my thirty-five years in medicine, I kept faith neatly …

Why do physicians write fiction?

Dr. Jonathan Hammel

Physician

June 2, 2026

I remember the moment I understood I would have to write this story.

I was in Berlin with my girlfriend, wandering the city hand in hand, stopping for coffee near the Tiergarten with no real plan. We decided to visit the Jewish Hospital, the Jüdisches Krankenhaus. I had heard the name so many times in my family, and now I was just a few metro stops away.

We entered beneath the old …

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Why do physicians write fiction?