Category: KevinMD

An interview with a medical student who failed the Boards

The first two years of medical school are geared towards learning enough so you can pass your first round of Boards. All the sleepless nights and the tears can be overwhelming, but to finally get to the finish line is an incredible achievement. It rein…

When physicians inappropriately judge

All physicians naturally make judgments regarding the parents they are interviewing. For example, we assess how accurate and plausible their history is. We try to decide if they are telling us the whole story and, if not, if they are inadvertently or d…

Why can e-cigarettes advertise on TV?

Why does e-cigarette maker Juul advertise its product on TV when cigarette ads are banned? The short answer: Because it can. For nearly 50 years, cigarette advertising has been banned from TV and radio. But electronic cigarettes — those battery-operate…

A nurse’s powerful ER exit letter

Dear hospital, The last three years, I have had the pleasure of working in our state’s renowned emergency department and level-1 trauma center. My departure closes out a decade of my nursing career as an emergency room and flight nurse. This depa…

How nurse practitioners can expand abortion access

It has been a savage few months for reproductive rights, with 12 states passing 26 bills to ban abortion, including measures that ban abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy, as well as attempting to outlaw safe methods of abortion. In the face o…

Today’s medicine is not the medicine I signed up for

Today’s medicine is not the medicine I signed up for. I am a Xennial. Sandwiched between generation X and millennials, I don’t really belong to either. I didn’t grow up with the technological advancements that the millennial generatio…

Do physicians feel guilt and embarrassment more often than they admit?

I was an intern, doing a rotation in the coronary care unit (CCU) of a large urban hospital. It was very challenging: The patients had complex medical issues, and my fellow residents and I were given lots of responsibility for their care. Still, I felt…

These medical students support Medicare for all. Here’s why.

The most difficult part of our first year of medical school wasn’t memorizing anatomy or mastering the patient interview, but seeing firsthand how broken our current health care system is. We pay twice as much as other wealthy nations for health care, …

MKSAP: 64-year-old woman with severe COPD

Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 64-year-old woman is evaluated during a posthospital visit for severe COPD with an FEV1 of 30% of predicted. She has been admitted three ti…

Is medicine really a model family-friendly profession?

An article in the New York Times touting medicine as a family-friendly profession has stirred up critics who say it denies the reality of career sacrifice and gaps in leadership and pay that female physicians face. Writer Claire Cain Miller profiled fe…