Patients once traveled on foot from Afghanistan to see my father, a Cleveland Clinic-trained doctor who practiced in Peshawar, Pakistan. It is easy to attribute such health care to a developing country. But California’s economy outperforms whole nations, and patients in the Central Valley still drive for hours to get life-saving treatment. I have lived and studied in both of these “doctor deserts,” one arid and one fertile. Both are …
An important paper, “How to communicate medical numbers,” was published in a recent edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). This is so important, for the doctor-patient relationship, for what journalists write for the public, and for individual decision-making. One of the authors, Angie Fagerlin, PhD, of the University of Utah medical school and Salt Lake City Veterans Affairs Medical Center, was interviewed for a …
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Health attorney Dennis Hursh discusses his article “First physician employment agreement mistakes.” Dennis shares his amazement after 30 years in health law at the timidity of new attending physicians during contract negotiations. …
There’s a quiet heaviness that has settled over medicine, not always visible, but deeply felt. It lingers in hospital corridors and hovers over clinic desks cluttered with charts and cold coffee cups. You can see it in the nurse scrolling through yet another new policy update, her shoulders sagging under invisible weight. You can hear it in the tired sigh of a physician glancing at the clock at 9 p.m., …
The creed of compliance
In every hospital, a grotesque comedy unfolds: Poor Sod, our hapless patient, lies gut-shot, aorta spewing like a B-movie fountain. Clinicians, faces blank as overcooked porridge, scurry in a choreographed panic, clutching flowcharts like sacred scrolls. Monitors bleep like a chorus of lobotomised parrots. A registrar, mad enough to trust his gut, tries a life-saving stunt not in the Holy Manual. A nurse, eyes glinting with the …
The day before the attack, a senior physician at a Catholic university hospital in Taiwan sat with young medical students at noon, talking not about lawsuits or hospital finances, but about Brahms. He loved four-hand piano pieces, especially Brahms’s Hungarian Dances, and he would explain how two players must breathe together, listen to one another, and balance passion with discipline. For him, this was also a lesson about medicine: You …
I just read the new Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine introduction by its editor-in-chief, and it’s laying out the usual playbook: demonize lipoprotein(a) (Lp(a)), list all the terrible things it does, and hint that salvation is around the corner, pending results of a major pharmaceutical trial, of course.
It’s a neat narrative arc.
But it’s incomplete.
What’s missing is the one question almost no cardiology article seems willing to ask:
Why does Lp(a) exist …
For years, I believed that the best clinicians were the ones who never stopped. We covered extra shifts, skipped meals, charted past midnight, and proudly wore exhaustion as a badge of honor. My patients were happy, my colleagues admired my work ethic, and I was quietly unraveling.
The slow slide into burnout
Burnout didn’t arrive like a crisis; it crept in as a constant background hum. I began to dread the pager’s …
Medicine is more than biology; it is organization. Every country builds its system of care according to its culture, economy, and priorities. In Japan, where I have spent the past few years, health care feels like an extension of social rhythm: precise, deliberate, quietly humane. In the United States, where I trained, the emphasis is on innovation and specialization, but often at the cost of coordination. Now, as I prepare …
Idaho has become the first state to end Medicaid funding for Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy. This marks a shift away from concerns about inflated billing and variable outcome metrics toward a model focused on measurable and inclusive care. As a pediatrician who participated in NIMH-RUPP trials and has observed the clinical evolution of ABA, I recognize the significance of Idaho’s decision. The state acted proactively rather than awaiting federal …
He came to my office holding the results of his coronary CT scan. His eyes went immediately to the numbers, his voice tense: “Doctor, my FFR is 0.86. Do I need a stent?”
This is not an unusual question anymore. Coronary CT angiography with fractional flow reserve (FFR-CT) is rapidly becoming a common tool in cardiology. It gives us noninvasive insight into whether a coronary lesion is functionally significant. In plain …
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Health care executive Kimberly Smith discusses her article “Why clinicians must lead health care tech innovation.” Kimberly explains why clinicians, who are on the front lines of patient care, are in the …
For nearly a decade, almost every time my husband, Teddy, went into the hospital, they asked if he had an advance directive. And he did: It was notarized and given to any doctor he saw and any hospital he visited, including the one he died in.
But on the last day of Teddy’s life, the interventions he received were explicitly against his wishes as documented in his advance directive: no resuscitation, …
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You notice them wherever they go. The new titans of industry dressed like college kids on their way to class. Recently, I saw a picture of Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, in a plain cotton T-shirt and nerdy trousers. With his overgrown beard completing the look, he resembled a man emerging from months deep in the jungle after a survivalist contest. Then there is Mark Zuckerberg, perpetually clad in …
During a casual conversation about mental health, a friend admitted something striking: “I stopped going to therapy because I’d leave feeling great, but by the time I actually needed what we talked about, like in the middle of an argument or a panic attack, I couldn’t remember any of it. It felt like throwing money away.”
This confession revealed a silent challenge in mental health care. The issue isn’t finding the …
Most men have heard jokes about finishing too soon, but few talk about it seriously, even when it causes anxiety, frustration, or distance in their relationships. Premature ejaculation (PE) is one of the most common male sexual health concerns, yet it remains buried under stigma and silence.
As a urologist, I often meet men who have struggled quietly for years, wondering whether what they experience is “normal,” if it can be …
Professional medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association (AMA), American Hospital Association (AHA), and American College of Physicians (ACP), do more than set policy. They are custodians of medicine’s ethical core, defenders of science, and guardians of public trust. Yet, at critical moments, these organizations too often fall back on a strategy of silence. That silence is not neutral. It carries real consequences.
Mixed messages, missed voices
Consider a recent example. …
“The most expensive piece of medical equipment is a doctor’s pen. And, as a rule, hospital executives don’t own the pen caps. Doctors do.” Dr. Atul Gawande, an endocrine surgeon practicing at Brigham’s Women and Children Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote those words in the June 1, 2009, edition of the New Yorker in an article entitled, “The Cost Conundrum.” In that article, Dr. Gawande compared health care expenditures …
“Health-care professionals are increasingly demoralised by pressure to prioritise their employers’ financial goals over patients’ needs and professional norms, as space for good work in a bad system narrows.” This statement from an October 2025 Lancet article spoke directly to my experience.
By all quantifiable metrics, I was successful. I’d just been promoted to associate professor in the number-one-ranked department in the country for my specialty. I had a rewarding leadership …
She had recently gone gluten-free and dairy-free to address persistent bloating and fatigue. She skipped breakfast to support her circadian rhythm, and she was careful to avoid sugar and processed foods. She was proud of her discipline, and her lab work looked fine, but over time, her meals had become more stressful than nourishing. Dining out made her anxious, and she had begun to worry about even small deviations from …
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