Physician

The attention economy is starving public health

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 …

Read more…

Why do physicians write fiction?

DEA fear is reshaping how doctors prescribe

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

June 2, 2026

For more than three decades, I prescribed Schedule II stimulants to children and adolescents with ADHD. I did it carefully, consistently, and always within clinical standards. Yet throughout those years, I carried a quiet, persistent fear, not of harming patients, but of being misinterpreted by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

That fear wasn’t irrational. It was structural.

The DEA’s enforcement posture has long treated volume as suspicion, clinical judgment as potential misconduct, …

Why scientific medicine alone is not making us healthier

Narinder Singh Parhar, MD

Physician

June 2, 2026

After nearly four decades in medicine, I have become convinced that one of the greatest threats facing American health care is not a lack of scientific advancement. It is the growing imbalance between what our health care system excels at and what it often neglects.

Modern medicine has achieved extraordinary successes. We routinely save patients from heart attacks, strokes, severe infections, trauma, and many cancers. We transplant organs, replace joints, implant …

Pregnant resident discrimination nearly cost me everything

Elham N. Samani, MD

Physician

June 1, 2026

I have delivered hundreds of babies. I have held the hands of women in their most terrifying and most joyful moments. I have spent my entire adult life becoming the kind of doctor who shows up, completely, compassionately, and without hesitation, for my patients. What I never imagined was that one day, bleeding and pregnant and alone in a call room at 21 weeks, I would be the one who …

Trust in medicine is restored by method, not empathy

Alan P. Feren, MD

Physician

June 1, 2026

Trust is often discussed in medicine as if it were mainly personal. Did the patient trust the clinician? Was the clinician empathetic? Did communication feel respectful? Did the patient feel heard? All of that matters. But it does not fully explain why trust breaks down in modern care.

Patients do not lose trust only when a clinician is rude, dismissive, or wrong. They lose trust when they leave an encounter without …

Violence against doctors: 5 forces that ignite it

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Physician

May 30, 2026

You might recall the 2002 film John Q., in which a desperate father takes a hospital emergency room hostage because his insurance company refuses to cover his son’s heart transplant. It is a gut-wrenching depiction of medical rage. But now looking back at that scenario from the vantage point of 2026, the moral direction of that anger feels fundamentally different from what physicians face today. John Q. was furious at …

Physician

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts

Subscribe to KevinMD and never miss a story!

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts