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Ketamine therapy for chronic pain and substance misuse

Meds

March 13, 2026

Health care works best when it solves real problems in real lives. That is why recent research on ketamine therapy for chronic pain deserves attention. The peer-reviewed study looked at 20 adults living with chronic pain who also struggled with substance misuse. The results suggest that carefully designed pain treatment may help more than pain alone. It may also improve mood and support recovery from substance misuse. In a …

How a broken hospital-to-home transition harms older adults

Gerald Kuo

Conditions

March 13, 2026

Families worry about stock market crashes. Retirees check their portfolios, track dividends, and follow market headlines. But in aging societies, the event that truly destroys a household’s stability rarely happens on Wall Street. It happens in the bathroom. An older adult falls.

I have seen this sequence unfold many times. The patient survives the hospital stay. The fracture is treated, medications are adjusted, and discharge instructions are printed. Clinicians feel relieved …

Kratom vs. 7-OH: Understanding the potency gap and risks

Emma Fenske and Bradley M. Buchheit

Meds

March 13, 2026

The clink of ice in the glass had been an evening “wind down” routine ever since the pandemic. It had served as a way to drown remnants of stress that bubbled up throughout the course of the day. This “routine” developed over weeks, but eventually evolved into dependence, addiction even, he worried. I need to do something about this before I lose it all, he thought one morning upon waking …

Navigating postoperative complications and post-surgical depression

Francisco M. Torres, MD

Conditions

March 13, 2026

Six months ago, I encountered a challenge I never expected: a robotic-assisted radical prostatectomy. Even now, writing about it feels surreal. Cancer rearranges life without warning, and surgery, regardless of how “minimally invasive” brochures describe it, alters you in ways only understood through experience.

The post-op instructions said that, within hours of surgery, I needed to stay active. That sounded simple enough beforehand. But no one asked about my fitness …

Repeating history: the ethics of the new Guinea-Bissau hepatitis B study

Meghan Johnston, MPH

Policy

March 13, 2026

In the late 1990s, a U.S.-funded study randomized HIV-positive pregnant women in Bangkok, Thailand, to either a placebo group or a group treated with a short course of AZT. At the time, AZT was the standard of care in the U.S., and researchers knew the medication protocol worked at reducing mother-to-child HIV transmission by nearly 70 percent. The study looked at whether a shortened protocol could meaningfully reduce …

Understanding the types of PTSD and how to treat them

Faust Ruggiero

Conditions

March 13, 2026

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that can develop after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event, characterized by intrusive memories (flashbacks, nightmares), avoidance of reminders, negative mood changes (fear, anger, detachment), and heightened arousal (easily startled, irritability). The diagnosis of PTSD requires symptoms lasting over a month causing significant distress or impairment, and not due to substances or other conditions.

The five types of post-traumatic stress disorder

There are …

Heat therapy activates proteins that repair cells and protect the heart [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

March 12, 2026

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

Hematologist-oncologist Khushali Jhaveri discusses her article “What the research really says about infrared saunas.” Khushali shares her personal journey from skepticism to advocacy after experiencing the profound physiological shifts of infrared heat …

The 9 laws of health care quality: Why metrics miss the point

Constantine Ioannou, MD

Physician

March 12, 2026

I have spent years watching the development of quality programs. What began as a way to ensure patient safety has gradually given way to an independent group of individuals whose job it is to interpret regulations and monitor those interpretations. In the process, the clinical richness of medicine has been lost. Judgment, narrative, and context matter less than forms and metrics. The work has shifted away from the bedside and …

The evolutionary intelligence of human milk: HMOs and lactose

Rao M. Uppu, PhD

Conditions

March 12, 2026

Human milk contains more than nutrients; it carries a quiet, evolutionary intelligence expressed through chemistry. It is not conscious thought, but the slow wisdom of evolution written into molecules that nourish, protect, and guide.

Among its most remarkable ingredients are the human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs). These complex sugars, present at around 0.5 to 1.5 g/dL, are not there to feed the infant directly.

They move through the stomach and small intestine largely …

The hidden risks of AI-generated progress notes in psychotherapy

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Tech

March 12, 2026

Imagine a patient who spends most of a therapy session talking about a single memory. He describes sitting in his car after visiting his mother in a nursing home, unable to start the engine. He sits there for nearly 20 minutes, staring at the steering wheel and wondering when the roles had reversed, when he had become the parent and she the child. Nothing dramatic happens in the session. No …

How AI in dentistry is changing your next checkup

Sowjanya Gunukula, DDS

Tech

March 12, 2026

You probably weren’t thinking about AI the last time you sat in the dental chair. You were wondering whether that shadow on the X-ray meant a cavity, and whether it would hurt. But AI was quite possibly already at work behind the scenes, and it’s about to play a much bigger role in your next visit. As a general dentist, I’ve watched the conversation about AI in medicine grow louder …

Grief and healing: Learning to live with absence

Michele Luckenbaugh

Conditions

March 12, 2026

Life begins, and life ends.
We know this
the way we know the sun will rise,
as a fact, not a feeling.

Those we cherish
and those who cherished us
leave without rehearsal,
no warning bell
to soften the blow.
As if the heart
could ever be trained for absence.

They were threaded into the ordinary,
morning light, evening quiet,
the familiar rhythm of breath and belonging.

We assumed their nearness was permanent,
the way we assume tomorrow.

There were shared breaths of laughter,
tears that needed …

I lost 218 pounds and my ability to walk: a bariatric surgery regret

Stephanie Mojica

Conditions

March 12, 2026

I worry about whether I can access a building much more at my current weight of 160 pounds than I did when I weighed 378 pounds.

My adult weight, until recently, averaged 300 pounds. But in early 2022 I weighed 350, and in 2013 I weighed 378.

At those weights, I worried about distances, the number of stairs, the width of doorways, and the strength of the furniture. Today, I still worry …

Night shift health tips: How to protect your circadian rhythm

Chinyelu E. Oraedu, MD

Physician

March 12, 2026

When I started working the night shift as a nocturnist straight out of residency, no one prepared me for the physical and mental toll that lifestyle would take on my body. My motivation for pursuing this job opportunity was to spend my daytime hours with my young children: twin boys and my daughter all under five years old.

Night shift work keeps hospitals running, cities safe, and essential services moving while …

How to master a new health care leadership role [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

March 11, 2026

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

Intensivist Cristin Mount and business operations lead Steve Lettrich from All Levels Leadership discuss their article “A 6-step framework for new health care leaders.” The authors address the common challenge where clinicians …

Medical school endurance: lessons from training for a 10K

Riya Sood

Education

March 11, 2026

During my second year of medical school, I resumed my long-standing hobby of running in an effort to stay physically strong and mentally reset. I enthusiastically signed up for a training program to run my first 10K. In the 12 weeks that followed, I discovered that the process of training to become a runner and training to become a physician share many similar pulses.

The uncertain feeling of readiness

Week one of …

Health care market distortion: How government intrusion hurts medicine

Allan Dobzyniak, MD

Physician

March 11, 2026

Could it be that it is not market forces that have distorted medicine but actually the fault of those who should have been integral to the evolution of the health care system, physicians? The industry has evolved based on circumstances. Government intrusion with unregulated bureaucracies and the poison of politics can now be described as the monopsony that is basic to the present market distortions. When pricing is arbitrary based …

The dangers of vertical integration in health care

Stephanie Waggel, MD

Policy

March 11, 2026

As a practicing physician who has worked in the health care field in five different countries, I have a pretty solid idea of why health care in the U.S. is so problematic. In the U.S., many entities related to health care are owned by the same companies. This is a concept called vertical integration, where one business controls every stage of the supply chain. To understand this, imagine the car …

Securing physician autonomy with employer-sponsored direct primary care

Dana Y. Lujan, MBA

Physician

March 11, 2026

I play Go. Not chess. Not checkers. Go: the ancient strategy game where the objective is not to capture pieces but to claim territory. In chess, you attack. In checkers, you jump. In Go, you place. Each stone lands quietly. Each position builds on the last. The opponent is still arguing about three moves ago while the board is already decided. The board has been built one placement at a …

The mathematics of merit: Quantifying bias in medical malpractice

Howard Smith, MD

Physician

March 11, 2026

Most medical experts in medical malpractice are influenced by bias. Yet, they produce a certificate of merit. There are many types of biases, but I concentrate on only those biases that represent a systematic distortion that directly undermines the reliability of certainty in data and are measured by Type I and Type II errors.

Under this circumstance, merit can be regarded as certainty minus those biases. Those biases are selection bias, …