To Honour the 1999 Graduates in Family Practice

Elizabeth Sousa, M.D

Hear ye!  Hear ye!  A word in your ear about Family Practice. Remember those discouraging remarks when you chose the specialty?

"You're too smart for that - you’ll just be a triage nurse - no-one uses G. P. s any more - you won’t learn enough about anything - how about a real med program? - internal medicine is more prestigious!  Just to recall a few of the more fatuous.

Now we are at the forefront of health care reform, advising the President (and his wife), and the envy of many of our limitless colleagues.

Tense your stapedius muscle for a moment, and peer through the cochlear window into the year 2,000. In the reflected cone of light you will see cardiologists, pars flaccida trembling, fumbling with a speculum and cytology brush.  Gastroenterologists, with their mastoid hot air cells quiet, will be reading the instructions on the MMR vaccine. Internists in their ivory labyrinths, will be descending the scala tympani to remove warts, while dermatologists may touch a vestibular nerve and tackle PMS. Gynecologists will be looking cephalad to the sacculus and utriculus, and obstetricians will strike many a chorda tympani by examining male patients. Our psychiatric colleagues, always on the antitragus of medicine, will, with eager manubria, be palpating prostates, while neurosurgeons will be balancing on the helix of acne therapy. If this trend does not make the neurologists nervous, it will certainly force the proctologists to move up from the rear.

Congratulations on your choice of Family Practice!