The judgment in the Oklahoma trial against Johnson & Johnson for their role in the opioid crisis is a good start to what deserves to be an ongoing pursuit of justice for the victims, their families, and the states. Any financial settlement is only …
Category: KevinMD
MKSAP: 50-year-old man with a left lower extremity ulcer
Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 50-year-old man is evaluated for a left lower extremity ulcer. He has a 15-year history of worsening arthritis for which he has never been …
The insanely brazen effort to remake medicine into a consumer industry
For over a decade, Washington, DC has been busy with fixing health care. For over a decade, the same government bureaucracy, the same advocacy (read lobbying) organizations, the same expert think tanks, the same academic centers, the same business asso…
How can we address retention in the era of physician burnout?
As we’ve seen, the lives of those working in the health care system has become overwhelmingly challenging, burdened by all of the excess nonmedical stuff that has been added into our lives as we try to take care of patients. From prior authorizat…
Physician coaching: the new normal?
What is coaching? It’s a conscious effort to notice and evaluate how our thinking impacts our experiences, how perspective shows up in the results of our life. Coaching has been integral to fields other than medicine for many years. Yet, many phy…
The blind man who helped this physician
“Go through the gate. You will see an old white fence on the right, and the broken-down shack to your left.” I listened intently to the mysterious blind man over the phone as the reception came in and out. “Drive for about a minute and then park where …
How telemedicine intersects with AI, social media, and precision medicine
Telemedicine will eventually become a more prominent part of our clinical practice, with the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) and social media and networks, and integration with precision medicine in electronic health records. As clinician…
The problem of overdiagnosis: What can patients do?
An interesting article in the journal Pediatrics is both intriguing and sobering. It is intriguing because it lays bare something we don’t talk much about or teach our students about; it is sobering because it describes the potential harm that can come…
This patient got an estimate before surgery. The bill was so much more.
From a planning perspective, Wolfgang Balzer is the perfect health care consumer. Balzer, an engineer, knew for several years he had a hernia that would need to be repaired, but it wasn’t an emergency, so he waited until the time was right. The opportu…
Advancing women in medicine — with a whisper
Personal journal entry, September 11, 2017: Sometimes we wear womanhood like a yoke — burdensome on our shoulders, as we carry the torch for younger women coming behind. Sometimes, we swing womanhood as a sword, slicing, and jousting for survival in a …
