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Your sinus infection may not be an infection

Conditions

June 2, 2026

Years ago, when I was the only otolaryngologist in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, I treated a young boy with allergies. We had tested him, confirmed his sensitivities, and gotten him stable: a daily antihistamine, a nasal steroid spray, and allergy shots he received in my office. He was doing well. Then, at the end of one summer, he went back to school and fell apart. His controlled allergies flared. His asthma …

DEA fear is reshaping how doctors prescribe

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

June 2, 2026

For more than three decades, I prescribed Schedule II stimulants to children and adolescents with ADHD. I did it carefully, consistently, and always within clinical standards. Yet throughout those years, I carried a quiet, persistent fear, not of harming patients, but of being misinterpreted by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

That fear wasn’t irrational. It was structural.

The DEA’s enforcement posture has long treated volume as suspicion, clinical judgment as potential misconduct, …

Why scientific medicine alone is not making us healthier

Narinder Singh Parhar, MD

Physician

June 2, 2026

After nearly four decades in medicine, I have become convinced that one of the greatest threats facing American health care is not a lack of scientific advancement. It is the growing imbalance between what our health care system excels at and what it often neglects.

Modern medicine has achieved extraordinary successes. We routinely save patients from heart attacks, strokes, severe infections, trauma, and many cancers. We transplant organs, replace joints, implant …

The double standard at the heart of chronic pain treatment

Joshua Saylor

Conditions

June 2, 2026

For many years, the medical establishment has argued, and in my view correctly, that addiction is a legitimate neurobiological condition that may often require long-term pharmacologic treatment, including with an opioid such as buprenorphine or methadone. This is not, in itself, a controversial stance. However, when the subject turns to pain, whether acute or chronic, many of the same institutions abruptly change their tone and, more importantly, their mindset. Pharmacologic …

Youth online gambling is the new opioid crisis

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions

June 2, 2026

Gen X (roughly 1965 to 1980) grew up as “latchkey kids” with no constant internet, more independence, figuring things out through trial and error. They often developed real resilience from facing hardships without much handholding. Gen Z (1997 to 2012) entered a world saturated with technology, social media, instant information, and a big emphasis on mental health. Many are thoughtful about emotional well-being but can be less practiced …

Heparin for acute coronary syndrome: a closer look

David K. Cundiff, MD

Meds

June 2, 2026

Last week, KevinMD published my blog titled “The anticoagulant standard of care nobody tested.” This week I’ll continue with a discussion of patients who may have been harmed by anticoagulants.

In 2001, two co-authors and I initiated a systematic review of “Anticoagulants versus non-steroidal anti-inflammatories or placebo for treatment of venous thromboembolism.” The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews delayed publishing it until 2006. Because of the delays, Medscape General …

MAHA has the right diagnosis and the wrong treatment plan [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

June 1, 2026

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

The same Robert Kennedy Jr. who sued Monsanto over glyphosate in 2017 is now defending an order to expand its production. What does a functional medicine physician do with that? Shiv K. Goel, …

The hidden causes of heart attacks in young adults

Samir Mammadov

Conditions

June 1, 2026

A 32-year-old male is rushed to the ER. An hour ago, he was playing football with his friends, as he does every week. No smoking. Barely drinks. No family history anyone knew about. He is 32 years old, and his heart is attacking him. He is not an anomaly anymore. He is a pattern. According to an extensive study spanning 16 years, the rate of having a heart attack …

Pregnant resident discrimination nearly cost me everything

Elham N. Samani, MD

Physician

June 1, 2026

I have delivered hundreds of babies. I have held the hands of women in their most terrifying and most joyful moments. I have spent my entire adult life becoming the kind of doctor who shows up, completely, compassionately, and without hesitation, for my patients. What I never imagined was that one day, bleeding and pregnant and alone in a call room at 21 weeks, I would be the one who …

Trust in medicine is restored by method, not empathy

Alan P. Feren, MD

Physician

June 1, 2026

Trust is often discussed in medicine as if it were mainly personal. Did the patient trust the clinician? Was the clinician empathetic? Did communication feel respectful? Did the patient feel heard? All of that matters. But it does not fully explain why trust breaks down in modern care.

Patients do not lose trust only when a clinician is rude, dismissive, or wrong. They lose trust when they leave an encounter without …

Health care worker burnout doesn’t end at retirement

Phyllis DiSalvo Katz

Conditions

June 1, 2026

The dream is always the same.

I’m pushing the ultrasound machine down a hospital hallway with an X-ray tech beside me. We’re on our way to do a portable exam when a voice crackles overhead: “Radiology to the ER. STAT.” She peels away toward the emergency department, and I turn back toward imaging alone. Then I can’t find my way back.

I step into elevators that open onto unfamiliar floors. I push …

Why HIPAA settlements hit independent practices

GetPracticeHelp

Finance

June 1, 2026

Most independent practices treat HIPAA as a documentation exercise. The policy binder sits on a shelf, the privacy notice is posted, the staff training certificate is in the file, and the assumption is that the practice is covered. Enforcement patterns over the last several years suggest a different exposure model. The settlements that reach small practices are rarely about the policies that were missing on paper. They are about the …

5 ways drug ads mislead patients on TV

M. Bennet Broner, PhD

Meds

June 1, 2026

I have written a couple of previous articles regarding pharmaceutical advertisements on TV and in print. I noted that they used glitz to sell their products, and that this was not helpful for patients, especially as many new products had potentially more severe side effects than older ones and were often of no greater effectiveness. The only significant difference was that newer products were more expensive.

The safety issue is of …

Read more…

5 ways drug ads mislead patients on TV

ICU nursing did not return to normal after COVID

Viksit Bali, RN

Conditions

May 31, 2026

I still hear my ventilator alarms in my sleep. But what stays with me is the silence.

For a long time, our ICU felt sealed off. No families. No clergy. No one at the bedside except us. When someone was dying at 2 a.m., it was machines, medication drips, and a screen propped up so a family could say goodbye from somewhere else.

We filled in the gaps. We had to. We …

The Goldwater Rule and the cost of psychiatric silence

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Conditions

May 31, 2026

When the American Psychiatric Association formalized Section 7.3 of its Principles of Medical Ethics in 1973, it acted with a clear sense of urgency. Nine years earlier, the psychiatric profession had profoundly embarrassed itself in a partisan poll published by Fact magazine, where 1,189 psychiatrists, without any clinical examinations, labeled Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater “psychologically unfit.” The diagnoses were sloppy, weaponized, and defamatory.

The decayed fortress of silence

In response, the …

A letter to my future self, the team physician

Sarah Haugh

Education

May 31, 2026

As a former Team USA figure skater with my own Olympic dreams, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own experience as an elite athlete while watching the Winter Olympics this year. With Match Day behind me and medical school graduation approaching, it is also time to dream of the future again.

In March, I matched into orthopedic surgery for residency, and I hope to complete a sports medicine fellowship to …

Peptide regulation: 4 lanes every physician must know

Benjamin González, MD

Meds

May 31, 2026

If you work in medicine long enough, you learn that science moves slowly. Regulation moves slower. And social media moves at the speed of caffeine and bad decisions. That collision is exactly what is happening right now in the peptide world.

One week the FDA tightens restrictions. The next week state medical boards issue warnings. Then telehealth companies pivot. Then compounding pharmacies change formulations. Then another peptide disappears from the market. …

What AI in medicine can and cannot do

Shiv K. Goel, MD

Tech

May 31, 2026

The announcement landed the way tech announcements usually do: bold claims, a glossy render, the implication that health care’s problems are basically engineering problems that nobody competent had gotten around to solving.

Elon Musk envisions Optimus, his humanoid AI robot, stepping into medical care. Surgical precision. Universal access. Automation of the tasks that slow medicine down. He has gone so far as to claim Optimus could one day perform “any medical …

Read more…

What AI in medicine can and cannot do

Why physicians need to learn cannabis medicine now

Janice Makela, MD

Meds

May 31, 2026

I am a geriatrics and hospice and palliative medicine physician with over 20 years of experience. Over the years, I have seen how cannabis has helped my patients, and I am very comfortable with my patients using cannabis.

But like many physicians, I was not formally trained in cannabis medicine. In fact, for the longest time I thought people smoked the leaves. It was only much later that I learned that …

I built clinical decision-support tools at the bedside

Ahmed Elsonbaty, MD

Tech

May 31, 2026

For most of my career I was an unlikely candidate to build software. I am a consultant cardiac anesthesiologist. My world was the operating room, the bypass machine, the bleeding patient, the next case.

What changed wasn’t ambition. It was a quiet realization: Life had become loud and fast, and I no longer had time to sit down, open a textbook, and read the way I once did. And I started …

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