Conditions

The misuse of hormone therapy in menopause care

Kay Corpus, MD

Conditions

February 20, 2026

As an integrative and functional medicine physician, I prescribe hormone therapy. I also see its misuse daily.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT), including bioidentical hormone therapy (BHRT), has re-entered menopause care with force, correcting decades of dismissal and undertreatment. That correction was necessary, but the pendulum has swung too far.

What I am seeing clinically is not thoughtful, physiology-based care. It is hormone-first medicine that bypasses stress physiology, nervous system dysregulation, trauma, metabolic …

Why “eat less, move more” fails for midlife weight loss

Marsha Shepherd Whitt

Conditions

February 20, 2026

Clinicians often notice a frustrating pattern: Women in midlife follow standard weight-loss advice, eat less and move more, yet see little progress. Calories are reduced, exercise increases, and still the scale barely moves. This is often blamed on motivation, discipline, or compliance. But in many cases, the real issue is not behavior. It’s physiology.

Perimenopause and menopause are not simply estrogen-deficient states; they are states of altered signaling, altered tissue responsiveness, …

The “ethical canary”: How moral injury signals systemic failure

Courtney Markham-Abedi, MD

Conditions

February 18, 2026

For the past month and maybe longer, I have been waking up with pressure in my chest. It worsened in December and continued to worsen in the new year. I had identified it as anxiety, but felt it was of a different quality than my run-of-the-mill anxiety. This feeling was more anguished.

During the first week of January, I volunteered at a clinic, where I saw patients, assessed, and treated psychiatric …

Trauma reactivation: Why news headlines trigger past abuse

Barbara Sparacino, MD

Conditions

February 18, 2026

She did not begin with the abuse; she began with sleep.

“I do not know why the news is bothering me so much,” she said. “I cannot turn it off. I feel on edge all the time.”

She was in her late 50s, successful, articulate, and with no prior trauma history documented in her chart. She insisted she was not “overreacting,” just “sensitive to injustice.” At the time, headlines were saturated with …

The healing power of physician presence in modern medicine

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Conditions

February 17, 2026

I remember a patient who sat silently, staring at the hospital ceiling. She had survived a sudden illness that left her body weak and her spirit shaken. No tests, medications, or procedures could touch the despair in her eyes. In that moment, I realized something fundamental: The physician’s presence itself can be the most potent form of care.

Medicine, at its best, is more than diagnosis or intervention. It is an …

ATTR-CM screening: the missing link in heart failure diagnosis

Radhesh K. Gupta

Conditions

February 17, 2026

Robert felt winded climbing stairs. At 76, he attributed his fatigue to age. He thought his heart medications needed adjusting. His cardiologist agreed, tweaking his blood pressure pills. Six months later, Robert collapsed. In the ER, doctors found his heart walls dangerously thickened, stiff as leather.

A simple nuclear scan revealed the truth: transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, or ATTR-CM, a progressive disease where misfolded proteins infiltrate the heart. Had anyone suspected it …

When the doctor becomes the patient: a breast cancer journey

Amy E. Sanders, MD

Conditions

February 16, 2026

At 62, I unwittingly became a cliché: the physician who makes a poor patient.

The hard lump in my right breast, directly inferior to the nipple at the 6 o’clock position, shocked and shook me in the middle of a long August night when it first poked me as I tossed and turned my way through a bout of insomnia.

A screening mammogram for September 12 had been on my calendar for …

Menstrual health in medicine: Addressing the gender gap in care

Cynthia Kumaran

Conditions

February 16, 2026

In medical school, I’ve been taught to take chest pain seriously. If a patient presents with angina, there are clear guidelines, robust evidence, and standardized protocols to follow. Yet, when a patient comes into the clinic describing mood swings, fatigue, or pain tied to their menstrual cycle, the responses of clinicians are often vague, stating, “That’s normal.” Behind that simple phrase lies decades of neglect in how we study, fund, …

Mobile wound care in 2026: Navigating regulatory pressures

John F. Curtis IV, MD

Conditions

February 15, 2026

I practice mobile wound care because it works. Treating chronic wounds in patients’ homes, skilled nursing facilities, and assisted living settings improves adherence, reduces missed visits, and often prevents avoidable hospitalizations. For medically complex patients, mobile wound care is not a convenience; it is frequently the only viable model.

But in 2026, mobile wound care is under sustained pressure. Lower local coverage determinations (LCDs), intensified CMS surveillance, and expanding documentation requirements …

Why smaller hospitals may be faster for cancer diagnosis

Gerald Kuo

Conditions

February 15, 2026

In modern medicine, we like to believe that geography no longer determines outcomes. Advanced technology, integrated referral systems, and universal health coverage are supposed to ensure timely care for everyone. Yet for one woman in Taiwan, a country often praised for having one of the world’s most efficient universal health care systems, the greatest obstacle to cancer treatment was not distance. It was time.

Ms. Li, a retired woman living in …

Missed diagnosis visceral leishmaniasis: a tragedy of note bloat

Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA

Conditions

February 15, 2026

As reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Louis-Hunter Kean was 34 years old when he died in November 2023 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP). For more than a year, he endured cyclical fevers as high as 104.5 F, drenching night sweats, profound fatigue, hepatosplenomegaly, cytopenias, and escalating inflammation. Over six months in 2023, he was hospitalized five times. His electronic medical record ballooned to …

Mifepristone restrictions: How bans force patients into riskier care

John Finnie-Maloney

Conditions

February 15, 2026

I will never forget the patient I met in the emergency department who was pale, trembling, and in tears, her family in distress at her side in the trauma bay. She was suffering complications after taking medication to end her pregnancy. While such side effects can occur with medical abortions, they are markedly more likely when patients are forced to use misoprostol alone, a reality in states that restrict access …

Pediatric care in Ghana: Addressing malnutrition and sickle cell disease

Benedicta Yayra Adu-Parku

Conditions

February 15, 2026

In Accra, Ghana, the ward glowed ocean blue under phototherapy lamps. Chlorhexidine lingered in the air, cardboard rustled beneath a mother’s thin blanket, and the soft gasp of a preterm infant punctuated the hum of monitors. A baby’s drool pooled at the corner of her mouth; when my gloved fingers brushed her cheek, she flinched. Her body spoke a language beyond words, and her mother translated every twitch with love.

Behind …

How February and Valentine’s Day impact lonely patients

Crystal W. Cené, MD, MPH

Conditions

February 14, 2026

Last year, at her annual physical, one of my patients told me that February was the hardest time of the year for her. Her husband died three years earlier in February. Her daughter lives out of state and doesn’t visit often. She has a neurologic condition which makes it difficult for her to get around. Her days are marked by TV dinners eaten alone, a phone that rarely rings, and …

The specter of death: Why mortality gives life meaning

Steve Sobel, MD

Conditions

February 14, 2026

The looming specter of death exerts significant psychological power over the living. Perhaps the most common ways of coping with our persistent death anxiety are to ignore it, actively deny it, or deliberately distract ourselves from it; but removing our protective blinders ultimately enables us to live a more meaningful and authentic life. If we genuinely wish to live well and to die well, we must intentionally develop our emotional …

Peyronie’s disease symptoms: Why men delay seeking help

Martina Ambardjieva, MD

Conditions

February 13, 2026

A man notices it in a moment he did not plan to analyze.

An erection that used to be straight now bends. There is a new ache. Sex feels different, less reliable, more tense. He tells himself it is temporary. He avoids looking too closely. He stops initiating intimacy. And most of the time, he does not say a word.

That quiet delay is one of the most overlooked parts of Peyronie’s …

Antimicrobial resistance causes: Why social factors matter more than drugs

Maureen Oluwaseun Adeboye

Conditions

February 12, 2026

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is being talked about more now than ever before, and for good reason. When medicines stop working for common infections, everyone loses. The World Health Organization has described AMR as one of the top global health threats, and in October 2025 published data suggesting that in parts of Africa, as many as one in five infections are resistant to commonly used antibiotics.

That statistic should alarm us. But …

The necessity of getting lost to find yourself

Michele Luckenbaugh

Conditions

February 11, 2026

We are born into corridors,
measured, labeled,
painted neutral,
walls rising before we learn how wide
our thoughts can stretch.

Lines are drawn early:
This is far enough,
this is acceptable,
this is where you stop.

We are told our ideas must sit quietly,
folded into boxes like unused maps,
that imagination is dangerous if it wanders,
that questions should behave
and answers should already be known.

Life, they say, is safest when it stays
inside the margins.

But something restless stirs
beneath the rules.
A pulse.
A whisper …

Medical bankruptcy: the hidden cost of U.S. health care

Richard A. Lawhern, PhD

Conditions

February 11, 2026

My wife underwent major surgery in December 2025. She remained 10 days in a Charlotte, NC, hospital and was then for several weeks supported at home by visiting nurses, a physical therapist, and a dietician. We just saw the bill: The hospital and participating doctors submitted bills of $120,000 to Medicare and to Tricare (family health insurance for military service veterans like me).

The 21 years that I served as a …

Tobacco treatment neglect: Why 25 million smokers are left behind

Edward Anselm, MD

Conditions

February 11, 2026

If a new disease emerged and killed this many people, everyone would be talking about it. This death rate has been constant over the last decade, despite the declining prevalence of cigarette smoking. The decline in prevalence is, for the most part, due to reduced adoption of smoking by teenagers, and younger smokers have been shifting to vaping. The prevalence of smoking among older, poor, less well-educated, and rural populations …

Conditions

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