Contents tagged with tafp president

  • President's Letter

    Tags: president's letter; amer shakil, december 2020, TAFP president, covid-19, new governance structure, UT southwestern

    Blessings, hopes, and new beginnings in difficult times
    Inaugural address of the newly installed TAFP President

    By Amer Shakil, MD
    TAFP President

    I feel incredibly blessed and honored to be elected as president of Texas Academy of Family Physicians. I recall my first TAFP meeting in the winter of 1998 after I had moved to Dallas and joined the St. Paul Residency Faculty. The following year, I joined the Commission on Academic Affairs and since then, I have hardly missed any TAFP meetings. A year later I also joined the Dallas Chapter of TAFP, where I still serve on the board.

    The reason I have been so regular in my attendance to these meetings is none other than the welcoming, supporting, and nurturing environment of TAFP, exemplified by its visionary leadership and staff year after year and meeting after meeting. I was lucky to find great mentors like Linda Siy and Doug Curran, colleagues like Jake Margo and Ashok Kumar, and of course all of our TAFP staff members.

    more
  • President's Letter

    Tags: Javier “Jake” Margo Jr., MD, tafp president, presidents letter, will you come play with me

    A celebration of family medicine: How Disney literally saved my life

    By Javier “Jake” Margo Jr., MD
    TAFP President

    A couple of summers ago, on a rare day off, I was working on a detailed email advocating to keep the electricity on for our not-for-profit community center, when my son James, who was 7 at the time, walked into my office — or as my Harry-Potter-centric friends have dubbed it, the “Room of Requirement,” because anything you need can be found there.

    He and I were the only two people in the house since my daughter, Ella, was at Girl Scout Camp and my wife, Lisa, was at work. He had given up trying to teach the cats play catch when he walked in, stopped just short of my elbow, stared silently with his big brown eyes, and asked, “Daddy, will you play with me?” 

    more
  • President's Letter

    Tags: Tricia Elliott, tafp president, presidents letter, september 2017

    What kind of system do we want?

    By Tricia Elliott, MD

    In his seminal book “The Signal and the Noise,” renowned statistician, Nate Silver, examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish the truth — the signal— from the noise, which he describes as a universe of ever-increasing information, relatively little of which is useful.

    Any candid observer of the now nearly decade-long effort to reform our health care system will readily admit that the health care debate we’ve been engaged in has generated a lot of noise and useless information for political gain. Our elected leaders, on both sides of the aisle, have been busy creating this noise and are now trapped in a political vise of their own making. They’ve sadly left the public with a binary choice of whose health care solution is better, that of the Republicans or the Democrats.

    more