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Professional identity in medicine has been hollowed out

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, …

AMA kratom policy needs regulation, not a 7-OH ban

Bryon Adinoff, MD

Medications

June 19, 2026

An American Medical Association (AMA) policy from June 9, 2026, calls for prohibiting the sale, distribution, and marketing of concentrated 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) products while supporting surveillance, additional research, and other public health measures for kratom, according to the AMA press release and the AMA House of Delegates report. This policy raises an uncomfortable question: Was the AMA duped on 7-OH?

The question is particularly relevant …

Why does periodontal disease hit South Asians harder?

Varsha Mantravadi

Conditions and Diseases

June 19, 2026

“Flossing widens the gaps between my teeth. Besides, these teeth aren’t even my own.”

Absolutely no one can convince my grandmother that flossing is important. Notorious in our family because all of her teeth are now implant crowns, she feels an increased disconnect with these “fake” teeth and doesn’t feel the need to take care of them. Many of her relatives in India confirm her beliefs by misguidedly advising against visiting …

Why clinical trials fail before enrollment even begins

Beata Pasek, EdD

Conditions and Diseases

June 19, 2026

When a clinical trial starts to struggle, the conversation almost always turns to enrollment, with recruitment numbers running low and retention becoming increasingly difficult to maintain as timelines slip and pressure mounts. Sponsors and study teams begin asking how enrollment can be improved, accelerated, or rescued, often treating it as the central problem that needs to be solved.

But after more than fifteen years working inside clinical research operations across academic …

Why is women’s mental health in psychiatry so overlooked?

Jincy Rajan, MD

Physician

June 19, 2026

“Women make up half the population, yet we still do not treat women’s mental health as a priority.”

Today, women’s mental health is a balance between what we know, what we ignore, and what we treat as optional. It exists in a landscape where society continues to find increasingly sophisticated ways to misunderstand it. When women speak, the world often responds with a polite, “Hmm, are you sure?”

I came to psychiatry …

Why doctors burn out connecting with patients, and how to fix it [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

June 18, 2026

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

Most doctors were never taught how to sit with a patient’s grief, anger, or fear without absorbing it. Eva Minkoff, a health care executive coach, and Kim Downey, a physical therapist and physician advocate, join Kevin to discuss their KevinMD article “Read more…

Why doctors burn out connecting with patients, and how to fix it [PODCAST]

Why I say no during a cosmetic surgery consultation

Richard V. Balikian, MD

Physician

June 18, 2026

One of the questions I get asked most often outside of the operating room has nothing to do with facelift techniques or eyelid anatomy.

It usually happens at dinner parties. Someone eventually finds out I’m a facial plastic surgeon, and after a few minutes the question comes: “Do you ever say no to patients?”

I always laugh because the answer is immediate. Absolutely. All the time. It’s my favorite thing to say. …

The generalist physician hiding in every specialist

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

June 18, 2026

The definition of a “doctor” is shifting in a way that feels increasingly fragmented. Growing up with a father who practiced for decades as a primary care physician before pursuing a residency in pediatrics, my baseline understanding of medicine was rooted in the “whole doctor” model. In that world, a physician addressed the majority of a patient’s needs and sought specialized intervention only when a situation truly demanded it. Today, …

Post-traumatic growth is not just cognitive reframing

Josette Pelatan, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

June 18, 2026

In 2022, during a hospitalization following an extreme psychological and physiological crisis, I experienced something I struggled to describe using existing clinical language. What followed did not feel like recovery, coping, or reframing. It felt like a complete neurological and existential reorganization.

As a researcher and writer grounded in trauma science, I searched for frameworks that could explain the magnitude and durability of the change. Post-traumatic growth (PTG) came closest. Yet …

Vaccine hesitancy is a language problem, not just science

Lindsey Sachs, Lauren Brick, and Vijay Rajput, MD

Conditions and Diseases

June 18, 2026

“Doctor, I’m not against medicine,” the patient said quietly, arms crossed before the conversation had barely begun. “I just don’t want any more vaccines.” The physician paused. The patient was a 65-year-old man with diabetes, chronic lung disease, and a recent hospitalization for pneumonia. The patient’s chart showed that he was overdue for influenza, COVID-19 booster, pneumococcal, and RSV immunizations. Ten years earlier, this discussion might have taken less than …

Why acts of kindness make you measurably happier

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions and Diseases

June 18, 2026

In an effort to discover the Neuroscience of Happiness, the concept that a significant portion of our daily happiness derives from how we contribute to the happiness of others is strongly supported by research on prosocial behavior, empathy, and social relationships. While pinpointing an exact percentage is difficult, multiple studies reveal a clear positive correlation between caring for others’ well-being and our own.

From early childhood, giving behaviors boost happiness. …

AI in global health has continent-sized blind spots

Dr. Buga Charles George Kenyi

Health Technology

June 18, 2026

There is no doctor in my village.

I grew up in Logwerle, a small community in Central Equatoria State, South Sudan. When people got sick, they traveled far for care, or they didn’t get care at all. In 2003, my family moved to northern Uganda so I could get an education. I started primary school at Teremunga Primary School in Koboko, completed my O-levels at St. Charles Lwanga, and my A-levels …

Why pediatric direct primary care belongs at the door

Trey Williams, MD, MBA

Physician

June 18, 2026

It starts the same way every time.

A parent sends a text at 10:47 p.m. Their two-year-old has had a fever for three days. The urgent care closed at nine. The ER is 45 minutes away and will cost them $400 before anything is done. The on-call nurse line put them on hold. So they do what parents in 2026 do: They scroll, they worry, and they wait for morning.

I built …

How relationships affect health, seen from the exam room

Shiv K. Goel, MD

Physician

June 18, 2026

For the first decade of my medical career, I thought I was treating bodies. By the second decade, I noticed something else. I was usually treating relationships. Patients almost never told me directly.

A woman in her late forties came into my office last year. She had gained 22 pounds in a year, on a routine that had worked for the decade before it. Her labs were normal. Her thyroid was …

Knowing when to stop treatment is medicine’s quiet burden

Beatrice Preti, MD

Physician

June 18, 2026

It was my first ICU call shift as a second-year resident, and my first time holding the code pager, which rested, quiet but not quite forgotten, in my scrub top pocket until around 10 p.m.

The overhead speakers blared to life just as the pager began to beep. I ran to the cardiac ICU, forgetting my carefully organized ACLS cards on my call room desk. The patient was a middle-aged male …

Isolation and suicidal thoughts: the quiet friend

Ronke Lawal, MBA

Conditions and Diseases

June 18, 2026

There is a father somewhere on the internet, grieving his son on camera, doing the brave and devastating work of converting his loss into warning signs for someone else’s child. He lists them carefully: if someone tidy becomes constantly disorganized, if nothing excites them anymore, if the texture of their daily life has quietly collapsed, please speak to someone, get professional help.

The comments beneath the video tell you everything about …

Merit in medical school admissions is more than scores

Tony L. Weaver, DO

Medical Education

June 18, 2026

Every physician begins as a traveler.

Before the white coat, before the title, before the privilege of caring for patients, we are all aspiring travelers trying to reach the same destination: competence, wisdom, clinical excellence, and the ability to serve human beings in their most vulnerable moments. Some begin that journey on well-paved roads, guided by physicians in the family, excellent schools, professional mentors, and the financial freedom to prepare without …

What home hospice care gave us in her final days

Richard A. Lawhern, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

June 18, 2026

My wife and companion of nearly 50 years is dead. She used to say that when I was home, the house was pretty quiet. As a health care educator and patient advocate, much of my time was spent at my computer in my study. But on the rare occasions when I traveled for work, the house was “too quiet” for her. If I didn’t before, I would understand what she …

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