Contents tagged with translational care
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MEMBER VOICES: The future of family medicine
By Larry Kravitz, MD, and Lily Cormier
Such high hopes when it all began in 1970, with a new specialty that renamed itself and decided to take primary care seriously. Family medicine is now more than 50 years old, with 133,000 physicians in the United States. Where will it all be 50 years from now?
There is an old African proverb, “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” We see our medical past in terms of our victories, but we minimize our failures. So we do as well with the future; we expect to build on our successes, and don’t understand that our failures tag along and can poison the wellspring of our dreams. As long as we keep applying the template of our distorted past to our expectations of the future, we will never see it coming. The future threatens to run over us from behind as we’re squinting our gaze to a glorious distant horizon. The future is all around us right now, but it is clouded by the rose-colored lenses we insist on wearing. We don’t need a false prophet nor do we need a harbinger of doom, but there are two conflicting futures ahead and we need to embrace them both.
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