I’m a big proponent of do-it-yourself investing. In the age of index funds, many investors can manage their own investments at very low cost. And fees you pay to a financial advisor could be used to invest and grow your nest egg. But that’s not to say …
Category: KevinMD
The mystery illness of Kim Kardashian West
Reality star and meta-celebrity Kim Kardashian West made the rounds on the network news and talk shows last week to promote her new line of shapewear. But she also talked about the recent health scare that was revealed on the latest episode of “K…
Don’t let patient care interfere with documentation
I’m being sarcastic, of course, but that’s often how it seems some days. Those are days when I’ve been busy at patients’ bedsides all day and then struggle to get my documentation done later, typically many hours later. I jot notes to myself as I go al…
The answer to physician burnout isn’t resilience training
The answer to physician burnout is purported to be resilience training. That’s like glorifying the natural ability of frogs to tolerate gradually heating and boiling water. Unfortunately, health care today has some toxic ingredients, and physician burn…
What has emergency medicine wrought? Helplessness.
It seems that all day, every day, I care for patients who simply won’t take care of themselves. And I sometimes think that we in emergency medicine have caused more harm than we expected. Now let me first say, I also take care of those who can’t care …
What’s the best way to treat doctors and nurses with drug addiction?
Dr. Wesley Boyd, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, has spent years working with state programs that help doctors, nurses and other health care workers who have become addicted to opioids get back on their feet professionally. He supports…
Doctors, do you really understand?
There is a haze lurking overhead clouding rational thinking. Thoughts wander back to times when my body was unencumbered, and I felt nothing was out of my grasp. Maybe that was an unrealistic thought, but it is how youth and inexperience protect one f…
Here’s why health care innovations stay secret
Having been an improvement advisor with many quality improvement initiatives and collaboratives, I have observed that stories about successful initiatives too often leave out major relational barriers that got in the way as well as the critical interve…
Who actually owns your medical records?
I was in a discussion with a group of patients about how difficult it is for patients to get access to their own medical records. It was initiated after one of my patients was refused copies of her recent hospitalization. There is much confusion out th…
Black market pharmaceuticals target immigrants
The bootleg medications were smuggled across the border and sold to mostly Latino immigrants in public spaces throughout Los Angeles — at swap meets, parks, beauty salons and makeshift stands outside mom-and-pop grocery stores. The drugs were cheap, an…
