KevinMD.com

3 pharma conflicts of interest hiding in plain sight

Medications

June 22, 2026

1. Medical journals are going the way of newspapers, as in “extinct”

Who remembers newspapers? Pre-smartphone compendiums of world and local events on paper that required reporters to investigate and inform?

When newspapers lost their classified ads, their financial fulcrum, to Craigslist, they lost their readers and reporters. No one could pay staff or printing or distribution without readers and advertisers, and the business model is otiose, especially because of the printing …

Anchoring bias killed my father inside a stroke center

Lori Nelson, MD

Physician

June 22, 2026

“Eighty-six-year-old man dies of a stroke.”

It is the kind of sentence medicine writes cleanly, almost mercifully, as though a life can be folded into a diagnosis and quietly filed away. I have read sentences like that in charts, discharge summaries, death certificates. But this time, the man was my father.

His name was Herbert Nelson. Herb. Herbie. Brother Nelson. Elder Nelson. Mr. Nelson. Daddy.

He did not die alone in some forgotten …

Dignity in medicine starts with how we are seen

Ravi S. Aysola, MD

Physician

June 22, 2026

Years ago, I read about the sapeurs of Congo, men living with limited means who spent extraordinary care, money, and intention on clothing, color, elegance, and style. At first glance, it can seem irrational. It is not.

Dress, for them, is not vanity. It is dignity. It is self-definition. It is a refusal to let circumstance have the final word on identity. I have been thinking about that today.

Today is Juneteenth.

Today, …

A hard week is not a verdict on a physician’s career

Sofia Dobrin, MD

Physician

June 22, 2026

It was a hard week.

A colleague was suddenly gone, thirteen years of patients, of history, of complicated cases, and just like that, the rest of us were absorbing it. The calls. The messages. The patients showing up at my clinic needing someone. My own patients waiting longer. Notes to review that weren’t mine. Work landing on my desk that nobody planned for and nobody asked me about.

I kept my charts …

Underage gambling thrives on offshore betting sites

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions and Diseases

June 22, 2026

Offshore online gambling companies, operating from jurisdictions with lax oversight, have built a business model that thrives on easy access for minors while evading meaningful U.S. regulations. These platforms often rely on superficial age verification that fails to protect vulnerable youth, leading to widespread underage participation, addiction, and profound suffering for victims and their families.

Inadequate age verification: a sham that enables harm

A core failure lies in the …

Who are you when the white coat is off?

Seleipiri Akobo, MD, MPH, MBA

Physician

June 22, 2026

Dear colleague,

I know exactly who you are. You are the one who has not missed a deadline since the third grade. You are the one who treats “triple board-certified” like a minimum requirement and “regional medical director” like a starting line. You are the one who has spent twenty years mastering the architecture of everyone else’s survival, while your own foundation is quietly crumbling.

But I have a question for you, …

Read more…

Who are you when the white coat is off?

The emotional weight of choosing food allergy treatment

Amanda Whitehouse, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

June 21, 2026

For years, food allergy families like mine were told the same thing: “Avoid the allergen and carry epinephrine.” Now, many walk into allergy clinics and hear something entirely different: “There are treatments that can help your child.”

What follows is often overwhelm, not relief.

As a psychologist working with the food allergy community, and as a parent who has sought out those treatments for my son, I have watched families try to …

How to use patient wearable data in cardiology visits

Tarpan Patel

Health Technology

June 21, 2026

A patient handed me his phone in clinic last week. He was 58, a runner, no known cardiovascular disease. “Doc, my WHOOP says my recovery has been in the red for two weeks. Should I be worried?”

Ten years ago, I would have politely deflected and ordered an echo if I felt the visit needed a deliverable. Today, I look at his screen. Because his wearable was telling me something his …

How AI is reshaping applied behavior analysis care

Brad Smith, PhD

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 …

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts

Subscribe to KevinMD and never miss a story!

Most Popular

Past Week

Past 6 Months

Recent Posts