Primary Care

5 health-destroying myths perpetuated by marketing

Conditions and Diseases

May 16, 2026

Scent beads and laundry additives are innocuous

If you are online or on broadcast you cannot miss it: personal care corporations telling you that you stink. Even if you are using deodorant on “those places,” your body smells all over, say a disturbing number of ads, and the odor “transfers” all over your house. Just saying.

The manic ads for dryer sheets, detergents, fabric softeners, and scent “love stories” do not mention …

Why your patient’s biggest barrier isn’t pain. It’s walking through the door. [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 15, 2026

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

What keeps millions of people from sitting in a dentist’s chair, even when modern technology has made procedures more comfortable than ever? Kaushal Shah is a general dentist and dental director managing multiple …

Why corporate medicine fails every physician-patient

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

May 15, 2026

Physicians make the worst patients. Not because we are demanding or entitled, but because we know exactly what is happening behind the curtain. We know when a delay is avoidable. We know when a clinician is being rushed. We know when a decision is being shaped by billing codes rather than clinical judgment. And we know when a system is quietly failing us, the same system we once defended, taught, …

Clinician peer support is a patient safety issue

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

Physician

May 14, 2026

Frontline clinicians work in a paradox. We care for others at their most vulnerable moments, yet we struggle to admit our own vulnerability. We recognize pain in patients, but we may miss it in the colleague working with us. We respond quickly to patients’ clinical deterioration, but we ignore our emotional deterioration until it becomes dangerous.

Frontline clinician suicide is not only an individual tragedy. It is also a workplace warning …

Normal labs miss what most patients are living through

Shiv K. Goel, MD

Conditions and Diseases

May 14, 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. …

Primary care crisis requires new training and skills

Justin Oldfield, MD

Physician

May 14, 2026

The primary care crisis has been well documented. Experts cite low pay, lack of respect and administrative burden, all of which have contributed to burnout and a growing shortage of primary care physicians (PCPs). But even if we solve those problems, are PCPs well-prepared to care for an increasingly older, sicker population saddled with psychiatric disease? For many PCPs practicing today, the answer is no. There are myriad reasons for …

Institutional misrepresentation harms vulnerable patients

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

May 14, 2026

She came back three weeks later, sicker. She had been seeing a physical therapist for her lower back pain. At her last visit she mentioned that her cough was getting worse. He said nothing, and she did not push it. She assumed if it mattered, he would have said so.

What she did not know was that she had been told she was seeing “the doctor.” Not a physical therapist. The …

Symptoms with normal labs deserve a better question

Shiv K. Goel, MD

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. …

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 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 …

How a clinical trial changed the way I see Mother’s Day

Regina Portnoy

Conditions and Diseases

May 10, 2026

Every year, as Mother’s Day approaches, we see the same messages.
Celebrate your mom. Call her. Hug her. Don’t take her for granted.
And yet, for so many, that hug is no longer possible.
There is a quiet grief that lives inside this day.
Because as long as our parents are alive, a part of us remains a child, protected, grounded, held by something bigger than ourselves.
And when that is gone, something shifts forever.

Years …

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 …

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 …

Prior authorization during surgery is not oversight

Steven E. Warren, MD, DPA

Physician

May 7, 2026

She was forty-eight years old and had already been through enough.

Her uterus had prolapsed. If you have not heard the term, let me be plain. The uterus had descended through the vaginal opening. It was outside her body. This is not a metaphor and it is not a minor complaint. It is a complete structural failure of the pelvic floor that turns walking, sitting, and basic dignity into a daily …

Patients don’t need certainty, they need your reasoning out loud [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 6, 2026

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

What if the biggest driver of unnecessary ER visits, malpractice claims, and patient anxiety isn’t a missed diagnosis but a missed sentence? Alan P. Feren, a retired surgeon, independent physician, health care consultant, …

How vocal biomarkers are revolutionizing early detection

Kang Hsu, Jr., MD

Conditions and Diseases

May 6, 2026

Early detection has always been one of medicine’s most powerful tools. The sooner we can identify cognitive, behavioral, or neurological conditions, the greater the potential benefit for patients, their caregivers, and their providers. That truth is even more pressing today. Thanks to rapid advances in artificial intelligence and speech analysis, vocal biomarkers have emerged as a fast, accurate, and non-invasive way to screen for a growing range of conditions. The …

Why physicians treat symptoms not causes of disease

Tomi Mitchell, MD

Physician

May 5, 2026

I have come to a realization, one that has been building quietly over years of practice, long before I had the language to articulate it fully. We are very good at doing what we were trained to do. And yet, something about what we are doing is not enough.

As physicians, we are exceptionally skilled at identifying symptoms, categorizing them, and intervening with precision. We move quickly. We think algorithmically. We …

The silent burden in health care and administrative waste

Donna Harvin‑Graham, MBA

Conditions and Diseases

May 4, 2026

In every operational environment I have worked in, labor is visible. It is assigned, measured, and supported. Health care is the only sector where the system routinely generates work it does not staff, does not track, and does not claim. Instead, that work is absorbed by patients, clinicians, and caregivers who carry it because the alternative is delay or failure. This quiet transfer of labor is what I call the …

How political divisiveness impacts your health and well-being

Mark F. Sullivan, MD

Physician

May 4, 2026

Physicians are trained to listen for symptoms that point to deeper problems. For example, chest pain can mean heart disease, and ongoing fatigue might signal depression or another illness. I once cared for a middle-aged teacher who showed how political divisiveness can affect health. She came in with headaches and trouble sleeping. While we spoke, she shared that her symptoms got worse during heated political debates at her school and …

Why artificial intelligence displacement threatens medical specialties

H. Michael Boulton, MD

Physician

May 3, 2026

Diagnostic radiology, as a physician-staffed specialty, will not exist in its current form within 20 years. Neither will diagnostic pathology. Neither, in all likelihood, will the outpatient model of endocrinology or general internal medicine as we currently understand it. These are not fringe predictions from technologists who have never set foot in a hospital; they are the logical endpoint of capability curves …

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