KevinMD.com

October 5, 2026Oct 5, 2026

1. The six-week myth vs. the thirty-year reality We all know the current standard of maternal health care operates on a dangerous illusion: the big ole' six-week checkup. We tell moms that once they pass this test, congrats! Recovery is…

1. The six-week myth vs. the thirty-year reality

We all know the current standard of maternal health care operates on a dangerous illusion: the big ole’ six-week checkup. We tell moms that once they pass this test, congrats! Recovery is complete and they are cleared to return to normal life and exercise.

It would be convenient if bodies healed by the calendar, wouldn’t it? What really happens during pregnancy, birth, and lactation …

Policy

Nursing home ratings hide what the federal record shows

Shawn Redd

October 5, 2026Oct 5, 2026

When a patient asks where to go for a knee replacement, a colonoscopy, or their mother's rehab stay, they have usually already looked. Not at the federal record. At the stars. Here is what the stars do not show. Our…

When a patient asks where to go for a knee replacement, a colonoscopy, or their mother’s rehab stay, they have usually already looked. Not at the federal record. At the stars.

Here is what the stars do not show. Our analysis of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services records found that 46 percent of U.S. nursing homes carry at least one federal civil money penalty on the current enforcement record, and …

Physicians

Who monitors patients after telehealth ADHD prescribing?

Timothy Lesaca, MD

October 5, 2026Oct 5, 2026

Last month, I took on five new patients who were already prescribed stimulants. I had not met any of them in person before. Each came to me with a diagnosis, an active Schedule II prescription, and a chart note from a telehealth visit that I cannot fully piece together. My role now seems to be continuing these prescriptions. I am concerned about the handoff, and I doubt anyone decided who …

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Conditions

Refusing to treat a patient is not the same as a boundary

Natalia Eden, RN

October 5, 2026Oct 5, 2026

A recent study found that, compared with people from other cultures, Americans are less likely to report feeling a sense of obligation to be present for their friends. If that reflects a broader cultural shift, it raises an uncomfortable question: Is this same emphasis on personal autonomy and individual comfort seeping into health care? Are health care professionals increasingly opting out of their obligation to care for patients when the …

Policy

Access to interventional psychiatry should not end downtown

Ravi Singareddy, MD

October 5, 2026Oct 5, 2026

A standard course of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for depression means coming to the clinic five days a week for four to six weeks, roughly 20 to 36 sessions. That is because response depends mainly on the number of…

Esketamine (Spravato) carries a different but equally demanding logistical load. Under its FDA safety program, known as a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS), each …

Education

Chronic curiosity is a diagnosis worth keeping for life

Jack Tiller

October 5, 2026Oct 5, 2026

ChatGPT once diagnosed me with chronic curiosity. I've been thinking about that diagnosis ever since, so I wanted to sit with it a little longer. Typically, the word "chronic" comes with a bad connotation. All it really means is that…

ChatGPT once diagnosed me with chronic curiosity. I’ve been thinking about that diagnosis ever since, so I wanted to sit with it a little longer.

Typically, the word “chronic” comes with a bad connotation. All it really means is that something is going to be with you forever but won’t shorten your life. If anything, chronic curiosity might extend mine; it means my brain is always working harder than baseline. …

Meds

Hunger after stopping tirzepatide can feel like burning

Patience C. Ennis

October 5, 2026Oct 5, 2026

When my hunger returned, it felt as though my stomach was burning from the inside out. It was acute, painful, and very physical. I pushed everything else aside and concentrated on getting rid of it. There was no negotiating with…

When my hunger returned, it felt as though my stomach was burning from the inside out.

It was acute, painful, and very physical. I pushed everything else aside and concentrated on getting rid of it. There was no negotiating with hunger that intense. My attention narrowed to what I could eat to make it stop.

I am a registered nurse with more than thirty years of clinical experience. I have had bariatric …

Tech

How to test ambient AI scribes before you sign a contract

Pat Williams

October 5, 2026Oct 5, 2026

For over a decade, the administrative burden in specialty medicine has quietly worsened. Orthopedic surgeons doing forty patients a day are spending more time in the EHR than in the room. Ambient AI scribes have changed that equation in ways that are only beginning to show up in the data. But the real opportunity isn’t efficiency for its own sake. It’s building toward a future where technology absorbs the mundane …

Podcast

ICU telemedicine done right is a program, not a doctor on a screen [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

October 4, 2026Oct 4, 2026

A patient in intensive care gets worse at 2 a.m., and the hospital has no critical care doctor in the building. Chris Gallagher, a cardiologist and founder of Access TeleCare, has spent 15 years building virtual care programs inside hospitals,…

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Policy

Voting and health outcomes: the cycle doctors ignore

Jacob Player, MD, MPH

October 4, 2026Oct 4, 2026

Poor health can negatively impact any and all aspects of our lives, often discouraging us from participating fully in activities we otherwise would. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that those with worse health are also less likely to vote, or…

Poor health can negatively impact any and all aspects of our lives, often discouraging us from participating fully in activities we otherwise would. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that those with worse health are also less likely to vote, or that voter participation is inversely associated with time spent in inpatient care. And while we may accept this at face value, the downstream consequences of this are often …

Physicians

Whole-person care starts in the operating room

Jerron C. Hill, MD

October 4, 2026Oct 4, 2026

For most of my career, my work has begun at the moment a patient is most vulnerable. As an anesthesiologist, I meet people at the threshold of surgery, often anxious, sometimes in pain, and always placing extraordinary trust in a physician they may have met only minutes earlier. My responsibility is to protect them through an experience they cannot control and, under general anesthesia, cannot describe while it is happening.

That …

Physicians

What doctors are talking about in 2026: AI, pain, burnout

Insights by KevinMD

October 4, 2026Oct 4, 2026

Clinicians wrote about AI more than anything else this quarter. Readers spent their time elsewhere: on burnout, on pain and opioids, and on what medicine costs the people who practice it. The first Insights by KevinMD report.

What doctors are talking about in 2026: AI, pain, burnout

Tech

AI hallucinations can invent what colleagues think of you

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

October 4, 2026Oct 4, 2026

As physicians, we are increasingly told that artificial intelligence will summarize our work, amplify our ideas, and help readers understand complex issues. But what happens when AI begins describing not what we have said, but what it imagines others think…

I recently conducted an informal experiment that exposed a troubling tendency in generative AI. After sharing excerpts from my manuscript The Autopsy, I asked Google’s Gemini a straightforward question: …

Conditions

Losing your athletic identity after a heart diagnosis

Loryn Kromrey, MD

October 4, 2026Oct 4, 2026

A routine EKG at my annual physical was supposed to be uneventful. Instead, it ended my marathon career. This past winter, I was diagnosed with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC), a rare inherited heart disease associated with ventricular arrhythmias, sudden…

A routine EKG at my annual physical was supposed to be uneventful. Instead, it ended my marathon career.

This past winter, I was diagnosed with arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC), a rare inherited heart disease associated with ventricular arrhythmias, sudden cardiac arrest, and an increased risk of life-threatening events during intense endurance exercise. I had no symptoms. No warning signs. I felt like the healthiest version of myself. Yet suddenly I …

Policy

Lancaster County measles outbreak exposes a crisis of trust

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

October 4, 2026Oct 4, 2026

For ten years, I lived with my family, 45 minutes from the rolling clover fields and dairy farms of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, iconic markers of a world defined by quiet tradition. Yet in the fall of 2026, this peaceful landscape has become a dark microcosm of modern medicine’s greatest crisis: the weaponization of politics, the spread of bad-faith disinformation, and the collapse of public trust in the medical profession.

As Pennsylvania …

Physicians

Slowing down in medicine starts with being interruptible

Sherry M. Adkins, MD, MPH

October 4, 2026Oct 4, 2026

One morning I sat on the porch with a cup of tea and read slowly. Birds moved somewhere beyond the yard. Wind passed through the trees. The locusts were already loud. Nothing remarkable happened. And yet, after a while, I…

One morning I sat on the porch with a cup of tea and read slowly. Birds moved somewhere beyond the yard. Wind passed through the trees. The locusts were already loud. Nothing remarkable happened.

And yet, after a while, I had the strange sense that my mind had returned to me. There was enough. Enough time to finish the paragraph. Enough quiet to notice the air. Enough room for one thought …

Conditions

Studying chronic pain suicide risk after opioid tapering

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

October 4, 2026Oct 4, 2026

CSI:OPIOIDs (Clinical Context of Suicide Following Opioid Transitions) is a rigorous scientific research study that systematically examines suicides occurring after prescription opioid dose reductions or discontinuations in patients with long-term (chronic) pain. Using psychological autopsy methods using detailed interviews with bereaved survivors combined with medical record review where obtainable, it seeks to characterize the multifactorial demographic, societal, clinical, and health-system factors involved. The study began as a pilot supported by …

Policy

Why milk banks in emergencies must plan like blood banks

Sharron Bransburg-Zabary, PhD

October 4, 2026Oct 4, 2026

As more families depend on human milk banks to meet the vital health and nutritional needs of babies, these facilities should implement emergency response plans, similar to those in blood and tissue banks and other critical medical services. Human milk is a lifesaving resource for preterm, low-birth-weight, and critically ill infants, with the World Health Organization recommending pasteurized donor milk for babies who are unable to receive their …

Podcast

Why women doctors leave in their forties and what keeps them [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

October 3, 2026Oct 3, 2026

Women physicians are walking away from practice in their forties, and not because they stopped loving the work. Dawn Sears is a gastroenterologist of 25 years and the founder of GutGirlMD Consulting, where she coaches physicians and runs Women in…

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Physicians

The physician independent contractor path is a third option

Paul B. Johnson, MD

October 3, 2026Oct 3, 2026

For much of my medical training, I assumed there were two basic career paths for physicians. You could become an employed physician, trading some autonomy for stability and institutional support. Or you could own a practice, accepting the administrative and…

I ultimately chose neither.

For approximately a decade, I have built my clinical career primarily as an independent contractor. As an …

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