Category: KevinMD

Why physicians should have courageous conversations

Many doctors make the decision to pursue a career in medicine in their youth.  They have an experience that points them in this direction.  And once the decision is followed by a firm commitment, we seldom change the course.  Medicine here I come! At t…

Use technology to fix medical education

Medical training is lengthening as students increasingly take gap years before and during medical school. Excessively long training times contribute to many problems. Trainees show high rates of burnout, depression, suicidal ideation, and alcohol abuse…

Stressed is desserts spelled backward

Tiramisu, chocolate mousse, red velvet cake, freshly baked cookies, and warm brownies topped with ice cream. These are some of my favorite desserts and the things I start thinking about when I am under intense stress. I often gaze at the bakery section…

Prescribing medication from a patient’s and physician’s perspective

At least a few times a year, I am asked to prescribe antibiotics to people who are not my patients. From my point of view, there is only one answer that makes sense here – no. I have the same reaction when patients call me for a refill or advice when I…

A health care headache from a patient’s perspective

As a relatively healthy Medicare patient, I do not visit doctors often. I have had digestive issues most of my life — probably from too many antibiotics when I was a child with recurring strep throat, or so I’m told. My husband and I had just ret…

You think insurance is confusing? Try being a patient.

My husband is a type 2 diabetic with mild chronic kidney disease, which has been well controlled on 500 mg metformin BID plus saxagliptin (AstraZeneca’s Onglyza). At the end of last year, he got a letter from his Medicare Advantage PPO, UnitedHea…

A doctor’s foray into meditation

It was mid-January, and I found myself catching some rays on a rooftop in Cancun with 15 other physicians — all women of varying ages and medical specialties. Besides enjoying the sand in my toes and a martini glass in my hand, I was there to attend th…

The doctor who avoids answering your questions

Most of us are, to some degree, procrastinators. We avoid or postpone doing unpleasant things. In this sense, physicians who are avoiders are no different from anyone else. For a doctor, however, avoiding things often leads to poor, or at least less th…

Improve mental health by improving how we finance health care

It takes an average of 10 years between symptom onset for mental health conditions to be accurately diagnosed and therefore treated. In addition to general misunderstandings about mental health, the nationwide shortage of mental health providers is one…

Sharing medical records won’t work

A major goal of MIPS is to increase the sharing of information between providers and eliminate so-called data silos. Central to this goal is the implementation of fast health care interoperability resources (FHIR). FHIR allows one EHR to directly query…