An excerpt from The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Ours is a culture wholly averse to death and even aging; think of how many products are geared toward erasing or “reversing” the signs of oncoming infirmit…
Category: primary care
The journey is to find the gift in the challenge
An excerpt from The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Ours is a culture wholly averse to death and even aging; think of how many products are geared toward erasing or “reversing” the signs of oncoming infirmit…
It is a gift to be on a team where people think differently
You may just think differently. Not wrong. It is a gift to be on a team where people think differently. However, some leaders want people to all to think like them. And they become upset and frustrated when you think differently. So we step back and ob…
Difficulties navigating the health care system are causing many Black and brown kids to fall through the cracks
A recent JAMA Pediatrics study confirmed what I see in practice as a pediatric primary care psychologist in Texas, one of four minority-majority states. The study reported alarming gaps between Black and Hispanic kids compared to white kids in attendan…
A physician’s reflections with certainty in medicine [PODCAST]
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes! “Lacking a supreme being in which to place our faith, my wife and I decided to make the most difficult decision of our lives and discontinue life support. I still wonder if we made th…
The slippery slope of utilization management
“The patient has a severe infection of the hand and is not improving on the current antibiotics,” I explained to the medical director at the insurance company. “I understand. However, the patient has no elevated white count or fever, …
Let doctors in recovery be able to recover their careers
The stigma of addiction is alive and destructive in Nebraska. I can speak to the truth of this statement because I am an opioid addict in recovery. And if you happen to be a physician like I am, you better be prepared to have your profession and life d…
The elephant in the room: end-of-life discussion with patients
I have been at my current hospital for 12-plus years now. Like many of you, I have gotten to know some of my patients very well. I have known some of them since I first started out here. We talk about my dogs and cows, our newest grandkids, and politic…
Amazon vs. Apple: Only one will rewrite the rules of health care
Big Tech has had a surprisingly small impact on U.S. health care, so far. Artificial intelligence, for example, outperforms physicians in many complex tasks (like reading mammograms and analyzing chest X-rays), yet AI remains woefully underused. Meanwh…
Literacy and patients’ understanding of health education
In my first bioethics class, the components of health education (HE) were just being developed, and despite the passage of time, full understanding remains elusive as HE proved far more complex than originally conceived. We learned, simplistically, by …
