Erin Cates

Most obesity medicine specialists never see what happens to a patient under anesthesia. Jessica Duncan, MD, did — for nearly a decade — before pivoting to obesity medicine and becoming chief medical officer at Ivim Health. The operating room (OR) shaped how she thinks about risk, adherence, and the conversations clinicians across specialties are still afraid to have. Medscape Medical News spoke with Duncan about what carried over. The first thing was a better understanding of obesity as a disease.

More than 101 million Americans live in federally designated primary care shortage areas, according to federal data from March 2026. Without a regular doctor, many go to urgent care instead. Nearly 30% of US adults visited an urgent care center or retail clinic in 2019, the CDC found. Those visits are a screening opportunity that largely goes unused. A fingerstick A1c needs no fasting and no specialized operator, and it returns a result in about 10 minutes.

Hemorrhage accounts for 30%-40% of injury-related deaths, and it’s the leading cause of potentially preventable death after injury. Many patients die before reaching the trauma bay. Pushing transfusion earlier, in ambulances and helicopters, has been the response. Researchers in Nebraska used hospitals’ own transfusion records to work out where that blood should go before a program buys a single unit.