Category: primary care

Become your own health advocate: Navigating the doctor shortage [PODCAST]

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes! In this episode, Ann M. Hester, a board-certified internal medicine physician, dives into the perfect storm brewing in the U.S. health care system and what we can do to prepare for it. The …

Patients vs. customers: the ethics of health care as a business

Medicine is both a business and a profession, with the business aspect being the provision of health care services for a fee and the professional aspect being the delivery of medical care for the patient’s benefit. The business of medicine refers…

From patient-centered care to paperwork-centered practice: the decline of primary care

A lot has been written about physician burnout, often it is attributed to the administrative burden, with some estimates that U.S. physicians spend an average of 1.84 hours a day completing documentation outside work hours. I’ve felt for some tim…

Retiring from medicine: the good, the bad, and the ugly

I retired as a physician at age 70, when COVID-19  came to town and the clinic I was working closed. During these past three years, I have had the luxury of a long view of my career. Every now and then, I feel the urge to pick up my stethoscope again a…

Addressing disparities in gynecological care for women with physical disabilities

I recently read a story in which a woman named H. Lee, who has muscular dystrophy, details a decade-long struggle to receive adequate cervical cancer screening. Providers have been unable to find her cervix due to the curvature of her spine, examined h…

Educating health care professionals on effective communication in rare disease diagnoses is crucial to improving the rare disease patient narrative 

For over 14 years, the last day of February, a month known for its rare number of days, has been recognized by organizations across the globe as Rare Disease Day. With over 300 million patients worldwide impacted by 7,000+ rare diseases, the day serves…

Combining academic medicine and private practice: a success story

In the United States, physicians are typically categorized as either academics or private practitioners. However, a case can be made that it is possible to construct a career path that incorporates both professional avenues. I was put in an excellent p…

Why your intuition is key to better physical and emotional health

In residency, we are trained to follow our intuition. In pediatrics,  this translates into learning how to recognize a sick kid. Of course, we are taught what to look for on the physical exam and the labs and what protocols to follow, but we are also t…

Unlocking the power of gratitude [PODCAST]

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes! Join us on this episode as we explore the power of gratitude with Cindy Tsai, an internal medicine physician. We all hear about the benefits of gratitude and the importance of being thankfu…

Breaking free from corporate medicine: one doctor’s quest for ethical care

An excerpt from If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It’s So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First. In late March 2021, during a lull between the third and fourth waves of the coronavirus pandemic, I drove to the small to…