Physician

Do no harm: Why physician burnout requires bottom-up reform

Physician

March 24, 2026

Before there were health care systems, insurance companies, or electronic medical records, there was the healer, a person embedded within the community, accountable not only for technical competence but for character.

My medical training outside the United States, while competitive and rigorous, remained service-oriented and community-based. Medicine historically was grounded in cultivated human qualities: humility, accountability, reverence for life, respect, and relational presence. Healing was not limited to scheduled interventions; it …

Institutional distrust in health care: Why a doctor lost faith

Joshua Mirrer, MD

Physician

March 24, 2026

Faith implies trust: confidence in an idea, a system, or a set of principles. In religion, it often requires adherence to divine authority, shaped by interpretation and tradition. Over time, those traditions can harden into dogma, discouraging curiosity and resisting ideas that challenge the prevailing worldview. This is not unique to religion. Any system that depends on belief risks the same fate.

When contradictions within a belief system become impossible to …

Debunking 4 myths about fertility treatments for women of color

Ilana Ressler, MD

Physician

March 23, 2026

Regina Townsend, founder of The Broken Brown Egg, writes that “trying to decide if you can emotionally afford the cost of building a Black or Brown family in a world that is concurrently showing you how low they are valued adds additional weight to an already heavy situation.”

Townsend emphasizes the importance of recognizing the lived experiences of women of color: “Infertility doesn’t see color, but my color …

Whole-body MRI screening: a radiologist’s guide to preventive scans

Amit Newatia, MD

Physician

March 23, 2026

Last year, a 45-year-old woman walked into my screening center in Laurel, MD. She was fit, healthy, and had no symptoms whatsoever. She just wanted peace of mind, the kind of baseline health data that her annual physical could not provide. Ninety minutes later, her whole-body MRI revealed a kidney tumor she did not know existed. No pain. No blood in her urine. Nothing to suggest she was harboring a …

How competency-based education is driving medical education reform

Ben Reinking, MD

Physician

March 23, 2026

As a pediatric cardiologist, I have spent my career watching children grow. During clinic visits, we track their height, weight, and milestones. We also sit with families and ask what makes their children smile. We might send a toddler to physical therapy for gross motor delay while we also encourage her love of art or music. Years of listening to parents share what their child enjoys has taught me that …

AI in health care: Why artificial intelligence cannot replace human empathy

Ryan McCarthy, MD

Physician

March 23, 2026

If you trust the titans of industry, and I do not, we are led to believe that, just around the proverbial corner, the equivalent of C-3PO will arrive to improve health care. How wonderful!

You might remember the fussy, shiny droid, the golden companion of R2-D2 in the Star Wars films. Fluent in over six million forms of communication, C-3PO bubbled with personality, …

AI bias in healthcare: When algorithms erase Black professionals

Seleipiri Akobo, MD, MPH, MBA

Physician

March 23, 2026

I was trying to be cool, so I recently joined a social media challenge with a simple prompt: “Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me.”

As a hospitalist, physician executive, and burnout architect, my digital footprint is deep. I talk about systemic health care reform, the psychology of exhaustion, and the structural “blueprints” needed to …

Compassion fatigue in medicine: Why the brain numbs trauma

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

March 22, 2026

In the sterile quiet of an exam room, a physician faces a patient recounting a history of profound trauma. To a layperson, the story is bone-chilling. To the seasoned clinician, it can occasionally and guiltily feel like data. We call it burnout or compassion fatigue, but biologically, it is something more fundamental. The human brain has a finite capacity for empathy.

Our neural circuitry evolved for small tribes, not for a …

The danger of detachment: How medical training reveals character

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

March 22, 2026

In 2016, Lauren Gambill wrote on KevinMD about being told, “She is not yours to grieve,” after a patient’s death. The message was clear: Grief was weakness, and physicians were expected to suppress it. Nearly a decade later, Arthur Lazarus argued that medical training does not change personality; it reveals scaffolding. He cited a “Blue Bloods” episode where Danny Reagan dismissed a racist watch leader and former cop with the …

The clash between defensive medicine and value-based health care

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

Physician

March 22, 2026

Defensive medicine grows where fear rules. Value-based health care grows where judgment, trust, and outcomes matter. That is the clash now facing many doctors. On paper, health systems say they want high-value care, better outcomes, lower waste, and patient-centered decisions. In real life, many doctors practice in an environment shaped by needless complaints, crushing legal defense costs, underfunded services, regulator overreach, and instant reputational damage through online and social media. …

Why physicians get stuck in productive and numbing cycles

Diane W. Shannon, MD, MPH

Physician

March 21, 2026

I had a mini epiphany recently. I realized there are three basic categories of time:

Productive: many work tasks (but not all), completing a task at home, achieving a specific personal or professional goal.
Non-productive and enriching: sleep, physical activity, being fully present with friends and family, learning something new.
Non-productive, non-enriching, and pleasurable: Netflix bingeing, drinking another glass of wine, zoning out, going down a social media rabbit hole, …
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Why physicians get stuck in productive and numbing cycles

A resident’s first surgery: When the patient teaches the doctor

Kaylan Baban, MD, MPH

Physician

March 21, 2026

“Dr. Baban? Dr. Baban?”

His slurred voice rasps across the room, weak but insistent, cutting through chiming monitors, buzzing fluorescent lights, and the screeching pager slung next to the empty gnaw in my stomach. I freeze where I stand, one hand scratching out post-operative orders on the last emergency surgery of the day, the other midway to the nursing station phone, grasping the silenced pager. My eyes sweep over the recovery …

What world leaders can learn from diverse medical teams

Zoran Naumovski, MD

Physician

March 21, 2026

I do not watch the news anymore. I do not listen to it on the radio. I do not even read about it online. But every once in a while, I will catch myself reading an article on Google News on my iPad. I, too, fall prey to clickbait on occasion. But, for the most part, I avoid the news: local, regional, state, national, and even international. It is too …

The controversy over Maintenance of Certification for grandfathered physicians

Bernard Leo Remakus, MD

Physician

March 21, 2026

I received a lifetime certification from the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) in 1983. Since then, I have not participated in any of the Board’s “Maintenance of Certification” (MOC) programs.

I have taken the continuation of my medical education seriously, and have performed more than the number of hours required for my state licensure, professional liability insurability, and AMA continuing education recognition awards. Additionally, I have taught medical students and …

Why patient-centered care transforms chronic pain management

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Physician

March 20, 2026

The real magic in chronic pain care isn’t just the pills or the procedures, but it’s the connection between doctor and patient. When a physician shows genuine empathy and truly listens, patients feel seen, trust deepens, and outcomes improve in ways that often outshine standard treatments. Take this striking study: Among more than 1,400 people with chronic low back pain, those cared for by highly empathic doctors ended up with …

How to manage a difficult patient and survive a high-conflict encounter

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

Physician

March 20, 2026

Every difficult patient is not dangerous. But every high-conflict encounter carries risk. Doctors like to think clinical skill will protect them: It will not. In modern practice, a physician can make a sound decision, communicate it poorly, and still walk into a complaint, a licensing problem, a lawsuit, or public reputational damage. That risk becomes even sharper in the care of chronic pain, substance misuse, insurance-driven visits, and patients whose …

The secret sauce of leadership trust in health care teams

All Levels Leadership

Physician

March 20, 2026

One of the true joys of leadership lies in building and leading an effective team. The sense of a shared vision and of all parts of the team striving in a coordinated fashion toward it is exhilarating. In contrast, we have all experienced what it is like when a team is struggling, with no common vision or shared effort. You might be wondering, “What is it that separates effective teams …

Why residents unionize: systemic reform, not entitlement

Paz De la Torre, MD

Physician

March 19, 2026

I read a recent JAMA Viewpoint on medical trainee unions not just with disappointment, but with a deep sense of recognition. It presents a narrow and skewed interpretation of unionization, framing it not as a response to systemic dysfunction but as a threat to medical education and hospital finances.

We do not unionize for marginal gains or lighter schedules. We are responding to an embedded educational hierarchy that excludes us …

Moving beyond the false binary of medicine as a calling

Christie Mulholland, MD

Physician

March 19, 2026

There is a resident doctor on TikTok named Julia who is also a raver. She posts about her training, and her weekends, dancing, festivals, après ski, living a full and visibly joyful life outside the hospital. The comments on her videos are glowing. “I would love to have a doctor like you.” “You seem like a real person.” A lot of patients are not looking for a self-sacrificing doctor who …

When side effects are actually a cry for help with medication costs

Shuchita Gupta, MD

Physician

March 19, 2026

“Doc, I cannot sleep well at night since I started taking the blood thinner (apixaban/Eliquis).”

“Hmm, that is not a typical side effect of the blood thinner. Have you considered any other changes to your routine that could be affecting how you sleep at night?”

“Doc, I also have joint pains and diarrhea since I started the blood thinner. Can I stop it?”

(The patient has had joint pains and diarrhea pre-dating the …