The Podcast by KevinMD

A patient arrives already sure of what is wrong with them. The words they use came from somewhere else. Alan P. Feren is a retired surgeon, health care consultant, and patient advocate. This episode is based on his article "Clinical authorship: the missing principle in medical AI," published on KevinMD. He walks through the three points where artificial intelligence enters a visit: the patient shaping their story beforehand, the clinician leaning on decision support, and the ambient tool interpreting it after. No single step is reckless, he says, and that is the problem, because a diagnosis can travel from...

Medical training hands you a ready-made group of friends. Then it ends, and many women physicians find themselves starting over alone in a new city. Cassie Burton Greenbaum is a pediatric critical care physician and the founder of Off Service Mom Co., a friendship matchmaking service for physician moms. This episode is based on her article "Physician loneliness is driving women out of medicine," published on KevinMD. You will hear why friendships get harder to build once you are the attending, and how a schedule with no pattern to it pulls you away from everyone who works ordinary hours...

Surgical training still runs on the model it did decades ago. Everything around it has changed. Danny Goel walks you through what that mismatch costs. He is an orthopedic surgeon, and this episode is based on his article "In 2026, the surgical backlog has a training bottleneck," published on KevinMD. You will hear why he counts surgeons themselves as a constraint on capacity, alongside operating rooms, beds, and funding, once residents have shorter hours in the hospital, operating rooms are under pressure to be efficient, and cases move to outpatient centers. He explains why cadaver labs, single-purpose simulators, and industry-funded...

You can learn more from watching a patient walk down the hallway than from the rest of the exam. Most exams happen sitting or lying down. Narinder Singh Parhar is an internal medicine physician and founder of Jeeva Health Systems. This episode is based on his article "Musculoskeletal health may be the foundation of prevention," published on KevinMD. After nearly 40 years in practice, he argues that medicine poured decades of investment into heart and brain prevention while leaving the musculoskeletal system behind. You will hear what a walk down the hallway reveals about cardiopulmonary reserve, fall risk, and confidence...

Most patients called difficult have a reason nobody has asked about. Every chart carries labels, and the labels rarely carry the person. Stella Awua-Larbi is a nephrologist who has practiced in the Chicago suburbs for more than 15 years. This episode is based on her article "The person behind the diagnosis every chart hides," published on KevinMD. You will hear how one young patient, labeled noncompliant and difficult, changed the way she reads a chart, and why a patient days out from surgery refused to walk the hallway. You will hear why she treats social history as seriously as the...

A patient with a urinary tract infection calls at 9 p.m. and gets told to call back in the morning. Frustrated patients default to the emergency room instead. Tod Stillson is a family physician, health care entrepreneur, and founder and CEO of ChatRx. This episode is based on his article "Why medicine is late to asynchronous telehealth," published on KevinMD. You will hear why traditional telemedicine did not close this gap, because it is still appointment-based and still synchronous. You will hear how orchestrated AI agents and standing orders can tee up a low-acuity case so the decision itself...

Only 4 in 10 caregivers say a doctor asked how the patient prefers to communicate. The patients who cannot answer often have the most to report. Chris Ross is a speech-language pathologist and school administrator. This episode is based on her article "Communication access is a patient safety issue," published on KevinMD. She spent 35 years giving nonverbal children a way to be understood, then woke from 12 days on ECMO with a tracheostomy and no way to say anything herself. You will hear what she tried when nobody on the unit knew sign language, what a respiratory therapist tore off a Kleenex...

Gratitude is easy to preach and hard to feel on a bad day. One physician spent a 40-year career learning to practice it on purpose. Scott Abramson is a neurologist and author. This episode is based on his article "A physician's three lessons on gratitude in medicine," published on KevinMD. You will hear the patient in a wheelchair who pointed out that his shoes never wear out, the colleague who still savors every sip of a Coca-Cola because he got one cup a year as a boy in Ghana, and what Paul McCartney's approach to singing Yesterday has to...

An emergency physician bought a new iPad and found 53 phone numbers he had forgotten were there. Each one was a family he put on a video call to say goodbye before he intubated their loved one. Howie Mell is an emergency physician with a master's degree in public health. This episode is based on his article "COVID trauma in emergency physicians can surface suddenly," published on KevinMD. You will hear why he says he never wanted to be thanked for the work but did not expect to be attacked over it. He explains why he wants the word burnout...

Your patients can see everything you post. So can the hospital that employs you. Tali Lando was posting funny videos from her office while two of her young patients lay in the hospital struggling to recover, and it left her torn. She is a pediatric otolaryngologist and airway surgeon. This episode is based on her article "The question doctors on social media should ask first," published on KevinMD. You will hear why her hospital once shut her accounts down completely and threatened her job, what two longtime parents said when she finally asked them directly, and why she calls...

The lab says the potassium is critically low. You walk in, and the patient looks completely fine. Duane Penshorn is an emergency physician and author. This episode is based on his article "Automation bias is the new medical error," published on KevinMD. He explains that automation bias got its name from studies of airline pilots, who had seen an alert be correct so many times that they stopped checking whether this one was. You will hear why point-of-care machines never answer "I don't know," and why most errors trace to how the sample was handled rather than to the...

A man is dying. He cannot speak, and no one in his life can say what he would have wanted. Kirsten Engel is a palliative medicine physician, and Medha Tripathi is a health writer and incoming Fulbright research scholar. This episode is based on their article "Guardianship and hospice care fail dying patients," published on KevinMD. They explain what happens when a patient has no family and no health care proxy, and a court appoints a guardian who has never met them. A move to comfort measures then needs a court date that can take weeks, while the hospital...

Someone you love says they are fine. They still eat, they still go to work, and no one asks a second time. Nneka Oluoha is an internal medicine physician and the author of a novel about a Nigerian immigrant living with depression. This episode is based on her article "The signs of depression a husband almost missed," published on KevinMD. She explains why depression is an illness the entire family carries, and why the people around someone are left with challenges of their own. You will hear why she believes therapy belongs to men and to children, and where...

A young mother arrived in the intensive care unit sick but improving. Overnight, her care was handed to a telemedicine physician on a video screen. By morning she was beyond saving. Keith Corl is an emergency and critical care medicine physician who has worked in more than 40 community hospitals. This episode is based on his article "Why tele-critical care fails the sickest ICU patients," published on KevinMD. You will hear how remote ICU coverage works in practice, why a physician who beams in arrives without the context that builds at the bedside, and what a split physical exam misses...

A trauma surgeon spent two decades on call for the worst nights of other people's lives. Then he ran his hospital's pandemic response. Then he could not function. Jeremy Heffner is a trauma surgeon, speaker, and author. This episode is based on his article "Why frontline health care workers get no mental support," published on KevinMD. You will hear how compartmentalizing one case after another works until it does not, and why he was told the system had nothing for him until he was in acute crisis. He describes what he learned about how a board treats a physician...

A patient in intensive care gets worse at 2 a.m., and the hospital has no critical care doctor in the building. Chris Gallagher, a cardiologist and founder of Access TeleCare, has spent 15 years building virtual care programs inside hospitals, and he explains why that gap is so hard to close. This episode is based on his article "Why tele-critical care deserves expansion, not retreat," published on KevinMD. You will hear why the technology can never be allowed to fail, why training doctors to build trust through a screen is its own skill, and how a team-based approach let his...

Women physicians are walking away from practice in their forties, and not because they stopped loving the work. Dawn Sears is a gastroenterologist of 25 years and the founder of GutGirlMD Consulting, where she coaches physicians and runs Women in Medicine groups. This episode is based on her article "10 ways to keep women physicians from leaving," published on KevinMD. You will hear why the job asks women to carry patient care, child rearing, and elder care at the same time, how the patient portal routes them 25 percent more messages than male physicians in the same practice, and what has genuinely...

Medical training hands you a ready-made group of friends. Then it ends, and many women physicians find themselves starting over alone in a new city. Cassie Burton Greenbaum is a pediatric critical care physician and the founder of Off Service Mom Co., a friendship matchmaking service for physician moms. This episode is based on her article "Physician loneliness is driving women out of medicine," published on KevinMD. You will hear why friendships get harder to build once you are the attending, and how a schedule with no pattern to it pulls you away from everyone who works ordinary hours...

Fear of AI is not the problem. Refusing to test it is. Eric Jennings, a board-certified, fellowship-trained ophthalmologist and the senior medical director of ophthalmology at ModMed, argues that hesitancy about AI is a protective clinical instinct, and that the right response is the one physicians are already trained to use: appraise it the way you would appraise a new drug or a new procedure. You will hear the line he draws between cautious skepticism, which asks to see the validation data, and paralysis, which demands a guarantee no technology can give. Eric explains how to read a vendor's...

America spends nearly a fifth of its economy on health care, yet chronic disease keeps rising and prevention lags. Narinder Singh Parhar, an internist and intensivist with four decades of experience across outpatient, hospital, and ICU care, argues that American medicine has grown top-heavy, brilliant at acute rescue but neglectful of the everyday habits that keep people well. This episode is based on his article "Why scientific medicine alone is not making us healthier," published on KevinMD. You will hear why splitting the body into specialties can lose sight of the whole person, how a few minutes a day...

A car shows up when you click a button and groceries arrive by tonight, but a doctor's appointment takes weeks. Payam Zamani started MY DR NOW while he was still a resident, in a clinic of twelve hundred square feet, and now runs more than eighty of them as founder and chief executive officer. This episode is based on his article "Primary care access is the real problem, not the system," published on KevinMD. You will hear why he says the eight to five scheduled visit exists for the clinic's predictability, not the patient's life, and what changed when...

A patient says her hip has hurt for a while. Whether she leaves trusting her doctor depends on what happens next. Alan P. Feren, a retired surgeon, health care consultant, and patient advocate, separates active listening, which makes a patient feel heard, from careful listening, which changes the reasoning. This episode is based on his article "Trust in medicine is restored by method, not empathy," published on KevinMD. He says the history alone gets you about seventy-five percent of the diagnosis, and that the step squeezed out of a fifteen-minute visit is the one deciding whether a plan is...

A patient came in with weight gain nobody could explain. Every test came back fine. Shiv K. Goel is a board-certified internal medicine and functional medicine physician. This episode is based on his article "How relationships affect health, seen from the exam room," published on KevinMD. He treats the people in a patient's life as part of the same picture as sleep, alcohol, and diet. A difficult supervisor and plain loneliness count as stress the way a marriage does. He is careful to say that a hard relationship does not cause disease. It changes the load the body is...

A doctor cracked open an airplane emergency kit and found a sticker saying there was no epinephrine inside. Lianne Mandelbaum, president of No Nut Traveler and airline correspondent for Allergic Living, has spent a decade collecting accounts like it. This episode is based on her article "Epinephrine on airplanes should not depend on the airline," published on KevinMD. You will hear what a proposed federal rule would change, replacing the required medication list with a flexible one and stripping the exemption paperwork that was the only record of which airlines carried nothing. She explains why antihistamines do not belong...

An eye surgeon who used to see forty patients a day now sees one to three in a morning, and he has no staff. Oren Fass, a board-certified ophthalmologist and cataract surgeon, has been an employed physician, a practice owner, and an owner who sold to private equity, and he now runs a solo micro practice. This episode is based on his article "The hidden variable in the physician burnout debate," published on KevinMD. You will hear how his agents read incoming faxes, start the scheduling, and apply his billing rules, and why he says this was not feasible...

A surgeon's kids FaceTime him from their iPads while he is in the operating room, and he cannot pick up. Alyssa Kressel, a strategic communications professional, has spent more than fifteen years alongside her husband's surgical training. This episode is based on her article "What the children of physicians carry," published on KevinMD. You will hear why the usual advice about adjusting hours does not fit a transplant schedule, and why she puts the weight on the time he is home. She talks about the doctors' wives and surgeons' wives groups that offered solidarity when nobody had a fix...

You drive home after a long shift and see someone standing at the roadside. It turns out to be a sign. Chinelle Miller had that happen more than once, and her first thought was that something was wrong with her. She is a physician and multidisciplinary artist. This episode is based on her article "Why seeing things doesn't mean you're losing your mind," published on KevinMD. You will hear what she found when she looked into it, and how the same experience shows up for other people she talked to. She describes what she was told when she raised...

Doctors have heard promises about health technology for decades. Now artificial intelligence has to deliver something better than what health care already has. Seema Verma, executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences and former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, explains where health systems stand with AI today. You will hear why ambient listening became the proof point physicians did not want taken away, and why bolt-on AI tools on older electronic health records could create more burden. Seema lays out the questions to ask before you trust an AI tool...

She loved the job for 20 years. She left anyway. Christine King, certified registered nurse anesthetist, returns to explain what changed in the operating room and what it cost her. This episode is based on her article "Why I left health care after almost 20 years," published on KevinMD. You will hear why decisions about whether a procedure happens started to feel like insurance decisions rather than medical ones. You will hear what workplace violence looks like in an operating room, where the threats came less from patients than from the people she worked alongside. You will hear why those incidents...

Many doctors picture themselves practicing until the day they die. Andrea Hayes decided otherwise, and tells you what came next. She is a retired endocrinologist, author, and speaker. This episode is based on her article "From endocrinologist to writer: a doctor's second act," published on KevinMD. You will hear how 30 years in practice, 25 of them independent and five in concierge medicine, ended without a single dramatic exit. She describes the office manager who stole a quarter of a million dollars while she was grieving her father, and how that betrayal pushed her to learn the business side she had...

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 physician and moved to put her on a corrective action plan for failing to follow its vaccine policy. He explains why she resigned rather than carry that on her record, what...

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 syndrome," published on KevinMD. You will hear why the pancreas makes more insulin when muscle stops responding, and why the ovary and the liver are still listening when it does. You will hear what that does to androgen levels, and...

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," published on KevinMD. You will hear what a ghost network is, and why the problem is worst in mental health. You will hear why the listings stay wrong, which has less to do with sloppy...

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," published on KevinMD. You will hear what separates a courage fund from an emergency fund, and why the difference is intent rather than structure. You will hear how to size one in months rather than dollars, and why a big...

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," published on KevinMD. You will hear why a screening result is not a confirmation, and what has to happen before anyone knows for certain. You will hear why familiarity, speed, and distrust of...

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. Why is it so underused?" published on KevinMD. You will hear what this therapy asks of a patient, from cell collection through the wait for manufacturing to the weeks spent living near a treatment center. They...

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 supplemental plan, and a lifetime of work behind him. He still could not fill a $500 prescription near the end of the year. Narinder argues that spending has piled up in hospitals, imaging, procedures, and...

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 looks like inside a medical shelter, where the exam rooms, the records, and the staffing are gone and the work comes back to a doctor and a patient. She describes who ends up in a...

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 infection from a cold, allergies, and COVID, and names the ten-day rule he uses before anyone gets a prescription. You will hear why a patient's certainty that the antibiotic worked last time is often wrong, what a...

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 from the care they need. Close to 10 percent of the time patients who should have been seen were told not to come in, and women were hit hardest. This episode is based...