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The hidden realities of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and U.S. health care policy

Conditions

April 7, 2026

The modern acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic was first recognized in the United States in early June 1981, when clusters of rare opportunistic infections were reported in young gay men in Los Angeles and other cities. Before the cause was understood, it was commonly called “GRID” (gay-related immune deficiency). In popular and some medical discussions, it was also referred to as the “gay plague,” “gay cancer,” and similar gay-specific labels. …

Understanding Generation 2 patient engagement platforms

Kevin J. Campbell, MD

Physician

April 7, 2026

Patient engagement platforms are software systems that deliver clinical information to patients and manage patient questions and concerns outside of scheduled visits, including patient portals, mobile apps, and messaging systems. After nearly a decade of watching (and studying) the evolution of patient engagement platforms, I have come to see them as two distinct generations. I will refer to them as Generation 1 and Generation 2. Not because this distinction exists …

How to win peer-to-peer calls: a medical director’s guide

Anonymous

Physician

April 7, 2026

I review your peer-to-peer calls. Here is why you keep losing.

I sit on the other side of your peer-to-peer call.

I am a physician medical director in utilization management. When you call to overturn a denial, I am the one listening. I have taken thousands of these calls over the past decade. I can tell within the first 30 seconds whether you are going to win.

Most of you lose. Not because …

Beyond physician burnout and understanding structural immiseration

Patrick Hudson, MD

Physician

April 7, 2026

We have been calling it burnout. The word took decades to arrive, and then it was everywhere. It appears in journal editorials, hospital wellness initiatives, and continuing medical education (CME) modules on resilience. It has validated scales. It is now the official language of physician distress. It is not wrong. But it is incomplete. It describes something real: exhaustion, detachment, the slow erosion of meaning. But burnout describes how the …

When patients ask to pray: Navigating spirituality in medicine

Lauren Davis, MDiv and Vijay Rajput, MD

Physician

April 7, 2026

Requests for prayer at the bedside are more common than many clinicians admit. Yet these moments often unfold quietly, undocumented, unexamined, and rarely addressed in training. Whether a clinician identifies as religious, spiritual, secular, or uncertain, such requests can stir discomfort. Still, patients continue to ask.

Sometimes it is direct: “Doctor, will you pray with me before surgery?”

Other times it is woven into hope: “I am praying God gives your steady …

Why weight regain is a predictable biological response after stopping GLP-1s [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

April 6, 2026

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

Obesity medicine physician Jessica Duncan discusses the article “GLP-1 weight regain: Why stopping medication leads to weight return.” Jessica explains that expecting to maintain weight loss after abruptly stopping GLP-1 therapy is …

Physician legal protection: Surviving academic medical center blame

David M.H. Lambert, DDS

Physician

April 6, 2026

On October 20, 2015, I did something unremarkable: I turned on the GPS app on my Android phone before driving to work. I had no idea that routine act would one day save my career and expose a pattern of institutional behavior that every academic physician needs to understand.

I was an assistant professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery at a major academic medical center. Two days after a high-risk patient …

Surviving ventricular tachycardia: What I learned as a patient

Loretta Cody, MD

Physician

April 6, 2026

What happens when the doctor becomes the patient? Is there anything learned or reinforced? For me, it was a life-changing experience both personally and professionally when I became the patient.

My story began on New Year’s Eve. I had been feeling dizzy associated with some chest pain and was scheduled to have a stress echo at my local hospital to make sure all was OK (of course it would be OK, …

How a hidden genetic mutation creates a severe pediatric anesthesia risk

Claudia Bruguera, MD & Luis Rodriguez, MD & Rita Agarwal, MD & Veronica Zoghbi, MD

Physician

April 6, 2026

Imagine a healthy eight-year-old boy going under general anesthesia for a routine procedure. His preanesthetic workup is unremarkable. His family history raises no flags. He receives sevoflurane, the most commonly used inhaled anesthetic in pediatric practice worldwide, and he does not wake up the same.

This is not a theoretical scenario. It has happened to families of Venezuelan ancestry on multiple continents, across multiple decades, and no one connected the dots. …

A physician’s poem on burnout and end-of-life care

Nisha Punatar, MD

Physician

April 6, 2026

They tell us doctors
to practice self-care,
as if grief were a muscle
that loosens with stretching.
But no one teaches
how to set down
a conversation about dying
and pick up
the rhythm of living.

At the end of the work day,
the questions still echo,
How much time do I have?
What would you do, doc?
The charts are closed,
but the questions remain open.

Burnout does not arrive
as flames.
It seeps,
through the small cracks
between hope and reality,
between doing everything possible
and knowing we have …

How the opioid superagonist DFNZ challenges pain medicine

Olumuyiwa Bamgbade, MD

Meds

April 5, 2026

A publication in Nature in April 2026 reports that N-desethyl-fluornitrazene (DFNZ), a modified nitazene and µ-opioid receptor (MOR) superagonist, produced potent analgesia in rodents with less respiratory depression, weaker dopamine-linked reward signaling, lower withdrawal burden, and no clear tolerance or MOR downregulation. The study challenges the usual assumption that very high MOR efficacy must inevitably produce the full adverse-effect profile seen with conventional opioids. Opioid pharmacology has long been …

Artificial intelligence in surgery: Balancing precision with clinical wisdom

Anastasios Papadonikolakis, MD, PhD

Tech

April 5, 2026

In the operating room, precision has never been greater. Modern surgery now relies on navigation systems, artificial intelligence, robotic assistance, digital planning platforms, and predictive analytics capable of modeling outcomes before the first incision is made. For the first time in medical history, technology allows surgeons to simulate procedures, optimize implant positioning, and reduce technical variability to levels once unimaginable.

Yet many surgeons recognize an uncomfortable paradox emerging beneath this progress: …

Confronting the reality of bullying in medicine today

Muhamad Aly Rifai, MD

Physician

April 5, 2026

I still remember the first time I saw what bullying in medicine could do to a physician in training. It was not loud at first. It was not always obvious. It came wrapped in authority, tone, pressure, and the quiet threat that a career could be damaged by people in power. A resident nearing her final year of dermatology training was being bullied by program leadership and others in the …

Living with numbness after mastectomy: the unseen impact on survivorship

Emily Hansen

Conditions

April 5, 2026

For years, I have heard breast cancer survivors share a common refrain: “I expected to lose my breasts. I did not expect to lose the ability to feel.”

Yet in exam rooms across the country, persistent numbness after mastectomy remains underdiscussed and poorly understood in routine care. It is often framed as an inevitable side effect rather than a life-altering outcome that impacts quality of life after cancer.

We have made tremendous …

The clinical evidence and reality of peptide therapy

Shiv K. Goel, MD

Meds

April 5, 2026

There is a sentence I have been practicing for two years. I believe peptide therapy works. It sounds simple. It is not simple. In the culture of evidence-based medicine, a culture I was trained in, believe in, and have practiced inside for over two decades, saying you believe something that the evidence has not yet fully validated carries consequences. Raised eyebrows at conferences. The careful distance of colleagues. The quiet …

The physician-in-triage model and rapid evaluation in emergency medicine

Marilyn McCullum, RN

Conditions

April 5, 2026

Most emergency departments feel perpetually behind. The waiting room fills, ambulances stack, and staff move quickly yet still feel behind. The reflex explanation everyone gives is capacity. We need more beds, more rooms, more space. That explanation is intuitive. It is also often incomplete.

In many departments, nothing meaningful happens after triage until a patient is placed in a permanent treatment room. No bed means no provider evaluation. No provider evaluation …

Why bariatric patients struggle with protein and how to fix it

Kevin Huffman, DO

Conditions

April 4, 2026

I have treated over 10,000 bariatric patients across my career, and if there is one issue that comes up more than almost anything else, it is protein. Specifically, patients not getting enough of it.

The research confirms what I see every day in practice. According to a continuing education review published in Bariatric Times, as many as 64 percent of postoperative bariatric and metabolic surgical patients are not reaching their recommended …

Why ABIM’s use of Medicare claims data violates physician autonomy

James Rudolph, MD

Physician

April 4, 2026

Most internal medicine physicians assume that when they sit for a board examination, their answers determine one thing: whether they pass. Few realize that their exam performance has been linked to federal Medicare claims data and used in research, without their knowledge or consent.

The American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) has published studies linking board scores to clinical outcomes derived from Medicare claims. ABIM presents these analyses as quality research …

Iranian physicians in 2026: a testament to medical courage

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

April 4, 2026

The stethoscope has always been more than a tool for auscultation; it is a physical bond between two human beings that no government has the authority to sever. In early 2026, as the Iranian regime launched a brutal crackdown on its own citizens, we witnessed the most extreme test of this bond. When the state demanded that physicians become extensions of the secret police, our colleagues in Iran chose the …

Why hospital systems fail to notice the human behind the bill [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

April 3, 2026

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

Patient advocate Eric Goldfarb discusses the article “How a pregnancy test on a male patient revealed health care flaws.” Eric shares the absurd and heartbreaking story of finding a pregnancy test charge …

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