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How AI is reshaping applied behavior analysis care

Conditions and Diseases

June 21, 2026

Most applied behavior analysis (ABA) practices are not lacking data. If anything, they have too much of it. The challenge is pulling it together to get a complete picture of client care, determining next steps, and maintaining compliance. Information lives in different, siloed systems. Getting the information you need often means exporting reports, manually reconciling numbers, and trying to connect the dots. By the time that work is done, the …

What the polycystic ovary syndrome name change means

Sathya Narayanan, PharmD

Conditions and Diseases

June 21, 2026

For decades, millions of women have walked into clinics, described a complex web of physical and emotional symptoms, and walked out with a diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). This condition affects an estimated 170 million women globally during their reproductive years. It is one of the most common endocrine disorders in women, affecting one in eight globally. Yet, the name we have used for it is fundamentally flawed.

The term …

Loneliness in successful men hides behind abundance

J.H. Lynn

Conditions and Diseases

June 21, 2026

My friend Barry has money galore that makes people assume he shouldn’t have any problems at all. He runs a thriving real estate business, owns multiple homes, collects cars, spends weekends on his boat, comes from a family most people would envy, has friends, and can buy expensive tchotchkes, little throwaway things he could replace without a second thought. On paper, he has everything. But every time I saw him, …

Dark money is writing your health care laws [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

June 20, 2026

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

Patients are being cut off from medications they need, doctors are afraid to prescribe, and the reason traces back to political donations most Americans never see. Richard A. Lawhern, health care educator and patient advocate, joins us to explain how lobbying money …

How anchoring bias in medicine missed a heart attack

Dr. Ahmed Azab

Conditions and Diseases

June 20, 2026

3 a.m. was the time I witnessed a case that changed the way I think.

He came in complaining of epigastric pain. He had eaten a whole chicken that night, a heavy meal, a simple explanation. The residents in the emergency department, exhausted at the end of a 15-hour shift and overwhelmed by the crowd of patients around them, gave him an IV H2 blocker and left him for monitoring. He …

Why a Hulu comedy’s food allergy myths are dangerous

Lianne Mandelbaum, PT

Conditions and Diseases

June 20, 2026

Food allergy has long been one of the few life-threatening medical conditions that society still treats as entertainment. For years, it has been the punchline in comedies. More recently, it has appeared as a convenient murder weapon in television dramas and thrillers. Now, in a recent comedy series, viewers are presented with something arguably just as dangerous: a storyline built around nearly every major misconception the public holds about food …

The physician financial literacy gap nobody addresses

David Schiettecatte, MD

Physician Finance

June 20, 2026

When I started earning a real income as a surgeon, I was thirty-two years old and financially illiterate. Nobody had taught me anything about money. Not medical school. Not my mentors. Not the hospital. Not the senior surgeons I admired.

I knew how to stop bleeding. I did not know how compound interest worked.

That personal anecdote is not the point. The point is that it is not personal at all. It …

A physician’s involuntary psychiatric hold, from inside

Ravi S. Aysola, MD

Conditions and Diseases

June 20, 2026

I was never suicidal.

I said the words because I believed I had no other way out.

By then I was restrained, masked, surrounded, and being moved through a medical system I understood too well. I am a physician. I have spent my career in pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine. I have managed patients on ventilators, spoken with families at the edge of death, treated sleep and breathing disorders, and taught …

Environmental exposures and cancer: the missing question

Natalia Perez

Health Policy

June 20, 2026

I didn’t learn about environmental health disparities in a classroom. I saw them growing up in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. I remember neighborhoods built from scrap materials, homes close to industrial waste, and families who seemed to face illness more often than chance alone could explain. At the time, I didn’t question it. Now, as I prepare for a career in medicine, I find myself revisiting those memories with a …

AI replacing doctors is not the point of AI in medicine

Michael Turken, MD, MPH

Health Technology

June 20, 2026

Robert Wachter has often discussed the productivity paradox: the frustrating delay between the introduction of a new technology and any actual gain in efficiency. In health care, we’ve lived this paradox through the electronic health record (EHR). We didn’t reinvent the medical record; we simply digitized the paper chart. We added billing artifacts, compliance language, and a deluge of alerts that serve the institution more than the patient.

Now, as generative …

How to recognize AI and health anxiety in medicine

Kamran Shukoor

Health Technology

June 20, 2026

The headache begins

The first time I worried I might have encephalitis, it wasn’t a textbook or professor that fueled my fear, it was the artificial intelligence (AI) on my phone.

It was late at night. I had a dull headache after studying, the kind I’d had dozens of times before. But this time felt different, because now I could interpret it. Earlier that week, we’d covered autoimmune encephalitis in a lecture. …

Why the people funding health care startups have never treated a patient [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

June 19, 2026

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

Most of the people deciding where billions of health care dollars get invested have never treated a patient. Harsha Moole, a physician scientist and health care venture capital founder, joins Kevin to discuss his KevinMD article “The crash cart that taught …

Why resident mistreatment puts patient care at risk

Anonymous

Physician

June 19, 2026

After 20 years in medical practice, I made the decision to return to training for six months as a neonatology fellow to regain my neonatology board eligibility. At 54 years old, I did not come in with illusions. I expected long hours, academic rigor, and the challenge of re-entering a structured training environment after decades of independence.

What I did not expect was to witness, so clearly and so persistently, a …

Patient access is where good care quietly breaks down

Juan Vera

Health Technology

June 19, 2026

After her shift, Rachel noticed the rash beneath her gloves had stopped burning, but it still worried her. She works night shifts as a cook and raises two children, so clinic hours fall when she’s sleeping, commuting, or managing family routines. During her overnight break, she searched on Google and found a clinic with strong reviews. The website did not offer online scheduling, so she had to call. She reached …

Wealth inequality is a clinical problem, not political

Sameen Farooq, MD

Physician

June 19, 2026

We live and work in a sick society. I know this isn’t a revelation as much as a cruel reality. The disparity between those with means and those without is noticeable in every available metric dissecting the spending habits of Americans, credit card indebtedness, retail, stock market portfolios. In this sick system, I am so tired of hearing about the ultra-rich whine and complain about the “difficulties of being …

5 ways physicians can shape health care investing

Harsha Moole, MD

Physician Finance

June 19, 2026

Whenever I speak to physician groups about health care investing, I get the same reaction. Interest first, then a pause. Then someone says, “That sounds great, but I’m not about to quit my practice and become a venture capitalist.”

They don’t have to.

The biggest misconception about physician involvement in health care investing is that it requires a career change. It doesn’t. Over the past seven years, I’ve built a network of …

AI in medical education needs to read widely

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Health Technology

June 19, 2026

An excerpt from Practicing in the Age of AI: Essays on Medicine, Meaning, and Machines.

I recently bought a children’s book for my four-year-old granddaughter. Tucked beneath the copyright page was a sentence I had never seen before: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.”

It wasn’t a medical text. It wasn’t a journal article …

Professional identity in medicine has been hollowed out

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

June 19, 2026

The recent argument that physicians should abandon insurance-based care because the economics no longer work is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The strategist’s view focuses on reimbursement, overhead, and the arithmetic of survival. Those pressures are real. But the deeper crisis in American medicine is not financial. It is cultural.

Insurance-based care didn’t collapse because the math stopped working. It collapsed because the professional culture that once held the system …

Why medical simulation training belongs in every rotation

Chuka Onuh

Medical Education

June 19, 2026

It was my first week of clinical rotations, the transition that I had spent years waiting for. Finally, being able to take care of patients. I was a newly minted clinical-phase medical student assigned an evening shift in a busy Chicago emergency department, eager to learn from clinical experience rather than a textbook or Anki deck.

The shift had been relatively quiet, and only 30 minutes remained as I finished my …

Opioid pain contracts turn doctors into parole officers

Jeffrey A. Singer, MD and Josh Bloom, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

June 19, 2026

The government’s misguided attempt to address the opioid overdoses did more than change prescribing practices. It changed the relationship between doctors and patients, and not for the better.

Before receiving opioid pain medication, many patients today are required to sign a “patient-prescriber agreement,” often called a “pain contract.” The patient agrees to submit to regular drug testing, disclose personal and family histories of substance use, follow strict rules about medication use, …

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