Category: KevinMD

Burnout is death by a thousand cuts

I think I’m finally burned out. And it’s been a long time coming. It likely started when my private physician-owned emergency group got bought out by one of the big corporate groups. The changes were small at first. Turning us into hourly paid employee…

Experience and in-depth knowledge can empower you with an appreciation for nuances

In medicine, contrary to common belief, it is not usually enough to know the diagnosis and its best treatment or procedure. Guidelines, checklists, and protocols only go so far when you are treating real people with diverse constitutions for multiple p…

Our optimal future U.S. health care system

Next in a series. The Healthcare Incentives Framework helps show how to fix incentives in health care systems. It starts by enumerating the five jobs we expect a health care system to do for us and then identifies which parties in the health care syste…

Combat burnout one bite at a time

I can’t speak on behalf of all in my specialty, but I wager that there is a good percentage of radiologists out there who essentially work nonstop from the moment they walk in the door to the moment they leave, working through lunch hours, etc. T…

Experienced-based medicine has value

There was a time, before treatment algorithms, when physicians would rely on the detailed bedside and/or office observations of their patients in conjunction with the most recent published peer-reviewed studies. Time spent with each patient was conside…

5 improvements needed to modernize the American hospital landscape

Over the past 40 years, the number of U.S. hospitals declined by 12 percent, from more than 7,100 in 1975 to 6,200 in 2017, according to the latest American Hospital Association survey. And, yet, despite shuttering nearly 1,000 facilities, hospitals re…

Medicare for all is dead because Democratic voters aren’t buying it

Fixing Obamacare and adding a public option is the health care policy territory first staked out by Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden. Writing about Biden’s plan recently on my blog, I said: If the Democrats capture the White House, kee…

We need to bring back the feel-good factor to medicine

Consider a medical trainee, in the second year of her medical training, who has made it a point to always show up early to work no matter the situation. She often times stays beyond the end of her shift to help out either her co-residents or juniors. S…

We need physicians who advocate for patients’ best interests

As presidential hopefuls debate health care reform, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish statements rooted in fact from fiction. According to PolitiFact, only 27% of politicians’ media statements regarding health care — whether from Dem…

What if people were only allowed to use food assistance dollars to buy healthy food?

One of my elderly relatives was in line at the grocery store one day and saw the person ahead of him, charging what looked like a cart full of junk food to her food assistance card. My relative was incensed: Why, should his hard-earned tax dollars be u…