The Podcast by KevinMD

A pediatrician gave a child vaccines the chart said he needed. The record showing he had already had them was buried in the system. Dennis Hursh is a health law attorney and founder of Physician Agreements Health Law. This episode is based on his article " EMR errors get blamed on physicians, not systems ," published on KevinMD. The health system did not fix the record system. It counseled the phy...

A condition named for the ovaries turns out to run through the muscle, the liver, and the pancreas. Insulin is the signal connecting them, and different organs hear it differently. Oluyemisi Famuyiwa, reproductive endocrinologist and founder of the Montgomery Fertility Center, returns to walk through it. This episode is based on her article " How insulin drives polyendocrine metabolic ovarian synd...

Your insurance company says these therapists take your plan. Most of them do not. That is the allegation behind seven class action lawsuits now moving through courts from Massachusetts to California. Attorney Steve Cohen returns to explain what his firm found when it called the names on those lists. This episode is based on his article " Mental health ghost networks are badly hurting patients ," p...

Physicians stay in jobs they cannot afford to leave. The wellness conversation talks about resilience and meaning, and never about what is in your bank account. Stanley Liu, cardiologist, financial planner, and founder of DocEmpowered, returns with a concept traditional financial planning does not have. This episode is based on his article " Unlocking career flexibility with a Courage Fund ," publ...

Your genetic test results now arrive on your phone before anyone is available to explain them. So the questions go to an online mom group, or to ChatGPT, and strangers answer first. Stephanie Waggel, physician and founder of Improve Medical Culture, has been watching that happen in real time. This episode is based on her article " Social media told her to abort her Turner syndrome baby ," publishe...

A treatment exists that can cure aggressive lymphoma after chemotherapy has failed. Only about two in ten eligible patients receive it. Manali Kamdar is clinical director of lymphoma services at the University of Colorado Anschutz, and Paolo Strati is an associate professor of lymphoma and myeloma at MD Anderson Cancer Center. This episode is based on their article " CAR-T therapy can cure cancer....

He counts four wounds in American medicine. Patients rarely bring up the first one, which is what health care costs. Narinder Singh Parhar is a physician with more than three decades in internal medicine, hospital medicine, and intensive care. This episode is based on his article " Health care affordability is now a moral crisis ," published on KevinMD. A retired Korean War veteran had Medicare, a...

In South Louisiana, hurricane season is treated like a fifth season of the year. Angela C. Johnson explains what that means for physicians and patients. She is an internal medicine physician and member of the American College of Physicians Board of Regents. This episode is based on her article " Physicians and natural disasters: the fifth season ," published on KevinMD. You will hear what care loo...

Most people who get antibiotics for a sinus infection never needed them, and the real problem goes untreated. Franklyn R. Gergits is a board-certified otolaryngologist who sees the patients that three, four, and five rounds of antibiotics did not fix. This episode is based on his article " We prescribe antibiotics for sinusitis without a diagnosis ," published on KevinMD. He separates a sinus infe...

What if medical AI judges you by how you write instead of what's actually wrong? A health care executive says it already does. Craig Hauben has spent 30 years in health care and the last several years researching AI, and he walks through studies showing that large language models trained on decades of human writing pick up on typos, misspellings, and emotional tone, then quietly route people away...

Leaving medicine can feel like erasing 20 years of work. What if it isn't a loss at all, but a language problem you can solve? Physician executive Shveta Gupta, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist, joins to unpack why so many doctors quietly fuse their identity with the white coat, and why a change in role can feel like being sent back to zero. This episode is based on her article " Leaving medici...

Everyone agrees health care should reward better outcomes at lower cost. So why hasn't it happened? The answer isn't payment models or policy. It comes down to the everyday choices individual clinicians make, and whether anyone can actually see them. Jeanne Cohen, a health care analytics founder and CEO, argues that the value in value-based care lives in the quality of each clinical decision, not...

Patients now choose doctors the way they shop for everything else, judging your practice online before they walk in. Ashley Gay, a branding expert, argues that a strong brand is not about ego but about earning trust, and that physicians who ignore this are quietly losing patients and talent to competitors who look more polished. This episode is based on her article " Branding a medical practice is...

Social media says to spike your fiber intake as fast as you can. That is where the bloating starts. Lisa Talamini is a registered dietitian nutritionist and senior vice president of clinical solutions at Wondr Health. This episode is based on her article " How to eat more fiber without the bloating ," published on KevinMD. You will hear why fibermaxxing with pills, powders, and fortified bars tend...

A man told his doctor he was struggling with addiction. The doctor told him this was not something he could help with. Devika Bhushan is a public health physician and a former acting surgeon general of California. This episode is based on her article " How addiction stigma in health care costs lives ," co-written with medical student Taylor Moss and published on KevinMD. You will hear what happene...

In a lot of towns there is only one health insurer left, and that is starting to show up in patient care. Rita Agarwal is a pediatric anesthesiologist who started asking why colleagues in a specialty she loves are heading for the door. This episode is based on her article " Insurance consolidation is a patient safety problem ," published on KevinMD. She explains why anesthesiology went from a top...

Ketamine made headlines for the wrong reasons, and people who could be helped by it are staying away. Jim Ellwood is an anesthesiologist who has given ketamine in the operating room and taken it himself for depression that nine medications failed to touch. This episode is based on his article " The truth about ketamine: an anesthesiologist explains drug safety ," published on KevinMD. He explains...

You can have five doctors and still have no one actually in charge of your care. That gap is where patients get lost. In this episode, retired surgeon and patient advocate Alan P. Feren walks through a common case where the surgeon, primary care, and specialists each assume someone else is directing the plan, and no one is. This episode is based on his article " Fragmented care needs clinical dire...

A resident read a student's personal statement and asked why she didn't just use ChatGPT. The comment landed like a wound. In this episode, certified coach and professor Kathleen Muldoon returns to unpack what a residency personal statement is actually for, and why an algorithm can't do it for you. This episode is based on her article " Why ChatGPT can't write your residency personal statement ,"...

At one university, the share of students receiving disability accommodations rose sevenfold in a decade. Is that progress? In this episode, health care educator and patient advocate Richard A. Lawhern argues that psychiatric overdiagnosis is handicapping the very students it aims to help, and that the research underneath much of modern psychiatry may not hold up. This episode is based on his artic...

After 20 years as a pediatrician, she stopped believing burnout meant she couldn't hack it. The problem was never her. In this episode, pediatrician and physician career development coach Gita Balakumar reframes burnout as a systemic burden wrongly blamed on the individual, and offers a different way to think about it. This episode is based on her article " What physicians and dragonflies share in...

At 2 a.m., a surgeon needed an answer fast and had no one to ask. So he built the tool himself, with no coding background. In this episode, consultant cardiac anesthesiologist Ahmed Elsonbaty explains how a single bleeding-patient case in the operating room pushed him to create bedside clinical decision-support tools now used by more than 10,000 doctors across 150 countries. This episode is based...

When his shifts were cut during the pandemic, he took a telemedicine job to pay the bills and ended up loving it. Suneer Chander is an emergency physician who co-wrote the article " Telemedicine as a career, not a side gig ," published on KevinMD. He makes the case that telemedicine is the most impactful public health advance to come out of the pandemic, yet most doctors treat it as weekend income...

He was sued for a case he barely remembered, and five years later it pushed him out of medicine. It is not just malpractice. Jordan Grumet is an internal medicine physician and the author of The Healthcare Heist: How Physicians and Patients Can Unite to Transform Health Care . In this conversation he traces how third parties like insurers, pharmaceutical companies, private equity, and malpractice...

She built a thriving practice in Manhattan and appeared all over the media. Then she walked away, and it was never burnout. Samantha Nazareth is a gastroenterologist and the author of the memoir I Left Anyway: The Life I Was Supposed to Want . In this conversation she describes a deliberate triple exit from her practice, her home, and a ten-year relationship, and the six-week sabbatical that becam...