Primary Care

The direct primary care HSA rule did not fix access

Health Policy

June 11, 2026

In a few weeks, the direct care community will celebrate the one-year anniversary of getting what it had been asking for. By the end of the first quarter, before the rule had been in effect for a single full billing cycle, it was already clear that the more consequential effect was not affordability. It was market design. As I wrote in January, when tax-advantaged dollars enter a care model, they …

The one question that measures physician integrity

Dr. Saad S. Alshohaib

Physician

June 9, 2026

There comes a night, somewhere near the end of a long career, when a physician sits alone with himself after the corridors have emptied and the pagers have gone quiet. He turns the years over in his mind, the patients who lived and the ones who did not, the diagnoses made in time and the ones missed, the easy hours and the impossible ones, and he discovers that the question …

Medical hierarchy is silencing young doctors who want to write

Dr. Buga Charles George Kenyi

Physician

June 6, 2026

When people wear hierarchy as a badge of honor, they literally stunt the growth of young doctors, especially in settings where resources are already limited.

I graduated from the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, Cuba in 2023, and have since returned home to serve my community. I am the first doctor from my village of Logwerle, Central Equatoria State, South Sudan, East Africa, and the first to speak four …

Why military patients carry pain a chart can’t explain

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

June 6, 2026

He came to me with chronic neck pain and headaches that would not quit. The diagnosis was already there: neck pain, degenerative disc disease, chronic headaches. But a diagnosis is not the same thing as a story.

We built a sports medicine treatment plan around what I could find on exam: trigger point injections, massage, soft tissue work. The pain would improve, then return. Every four weeks became every two because …

You don’t have to feel called to medicine to be a good doctor [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

June 5, 2026

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

Is medicine a calling or just a job? Christie Mulholland thinks that question is the wrong one, and answering it keeps physicians stuck in burnout. Christie, a palliative care physician and certified physician development coach, returns to the show to introduce a …

When a divorce ends a physician’s career

Donald J. Murphy, MD

Physician

June 5, 2026

Anyone who has been gaslit knows it feels like hell on earth. We might as well be soldiers in a foreign war. When we return from the war of gaslighting, we deal with PTSD. Eventually, we feel the healing of the wounds.

I am one of thousands of victims of gaslighting in Colorado. All victims have unique stories. In pursuing justice for many of these victims, I’ve learned that lawyers, judges, …

Military sports medicine and the cost of readiness

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

June 5, 2026

I came to military medicine as a sports medicine physician. At first, it seemed like an unexpected place for that training. But the more soldiers I treated, the more obvious it became: What better place for sports medicine than the military?

Sports medicine is built around performance, load, recovery, rehabilitation, and preserving function over time. In military medicine, the language changes but the principles are the same. Return to sport becomes …

When difficulty swallowing pills looks like noncompliance

Laurel A. Coons, PhD

Conditions and Diseases

June 4, 2026

An older patient tells the health care team that swallowing medications is difficult. Pills get stuck in the throat. Some trigger gagging. Others are skipped altogether because taking them has become an ordeal. The concern is documented, the difficulty is acknowledged, and in some cases, a swallowing assessment is even performed. Yet the prescription remains unchanged.

Weeks later, the patient has missed doses or stopped the medication altogether. The medical record …

What happened when I brought faith into medicine

Francisco M. Torres, MD

Physician

June 2, 2026

There is a topic that has been avoided since the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment in medical discourse. Nothing to do with diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment protocols, but about the invisible human nature that holds patients together when science runs out of answers. That conversation is about faith.

I personally did not have it for a long time. For most of my thirty-five years in medicine, I kept faith neatly …

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 …

Peptide regulation: 4 lanes every physician must know

Benjamin González, MD

Medications

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. …

Communication access is a patient safety issue

Chris Ross, PhD, CCC-SLP

Conditions and Diseases

May 28, 2026

Imagine nearly dying while being unable to communicate your health needs, and the important medical decision-making doesn’t involve you. All that is left for you to do is to feel frustrated, helpless, and afraid.

I had such an experience at the height of the pandemic when I contracted COVID-19 and landed in the intensive care unit. I was put on a ventilator and then on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, the highest form …

35 years after choosing psychiatry as a specialty

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

May 27, 2026

35 years ago, I stood in a hospital hallway and made a decision that would define the rest of my professional life. I was halfway through my internship year in radiation oncology, a field of high-tech linear accelerators and clear-cut protocols, but my heart had drifted toward psychiatry. When I finally voiced my intent to switch, I didn’t find the collegial support we are taught to value in medical training. …

Bedside medicine and the meaning of physician presence

Gus W. Krucke, MD

Physician

May 26, 2026

Transitioning from one part of the country to another can be daunting, though for me it has become a fascinating lesson in both what differentiates us and what remains remarkably the same. Geography changes. Accents shift. Customs vary. Yet suffering, fear, hope, and love seem to speak a language of their own.

I have continued to practice medicine much as I always have, in person, at the bedside, and in patients’ …

Physician burnout is quietly costing doctors themselves

Jerina Gani, MD, MPH

Physician

May 24, 2026

What if I told you that burnout is not the most dangerous thing happening to primary care physicians right now? I actually think there’s something worse, and it’s happening quietly. Because many experienced doctors are slowly losing something they never expected to lose: themselves.

Not their license. Not their income. Not even their career. Themselves. Their energy. Their personality. Their joy. Their curiosity. Their life outside medicine.

Hello, I’m Dr. Gani. And …

Fragmented care needs clinical direction, not more data

Alan P. Feren, MD

Physician

May 23, 2026

Patients often assume that someone is directing their care. That there is a clinician who sees the whole picture, integrates the information, and guides what happens next. In many cases, that is not how modern care is structured. Patients move between clinicians (primary care, specialists, urgent care, consultants), each focused appropriately on a specific aspect of the problem. Each encounter may be thorough. Each decision may be reasonable. Each plan …

Primary care, bloodletting, and what medicine got right [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 22, 2026

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

Robert C. Smith is best known for arguing medicine lost its mind. This episode he explains why he is still proud to be a doctor. Primary care physicians deliver 75 percent of the …

The referral trap: How specialization fragments care

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

May 19, 2026

She was already seated when I walked in. On the desk in front of her sat a large sleeve, the kind that holds imaging films, oversized and awkward, the kind that no longer fits in a folder or a binder or anywhere in a modern clinic. Beside it was a folder. Labs indexed by specialist and date. Notes from orthopedics, neurology, rheumatology, pain management, and physical therapy. Every test, every …

14 patients studied, thousands injecting: the peptide evidence gap [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 18, 2026

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

Why do patients refuse statins backed by decades of data in millions of people yet eagerly inject peptides tested in fewer than 20? Emergency medicine physician and longevity practitioner Vikas Patel confronts this …

Reclaiming the lost art of the physical exam

Ann Lebeck, MD

Physician

May 18, 2026

Before the imaging, the lab work, or the referral, there is a moment when the body is already speaking.

The way someone walks into the room. The hesitation before sitting down. The guarded turn of a shoulder. The subtle shift away from one hip before pain is ever described.

Medicine once placed enormous value on these observations. Observation was not separate from diagnosis; it was the beginning of it.

Sherlock Holmes famously suggested …