January 2026

At a recent work meeting, one topic of discussion was the shortage of exam rooms for residents in the former city hospital where I practice. Should residents clean the rooms between patients to improve patient flow? Most of my colleagues were opposed to this idea. Wouldn’t it be yet another deterrent for residents contemplating primary care?

Later that morning, I had my annual physical with the primary care doctor I’ve been seeing since my own residency. Her urban office had been flooded over the holidays by a burst pipe, so she was seeing patients in a temporary location, in a tony suburb west of Boston. I drove into the office park and noticed a Morgan Stanley building. I stopped to let two young men, who looked like walking clichés of financiers-in-the-making, cross. One of them turned toward me and smirked. What did that mean? I wondered. I pulled into an open parking space and entered the building that was temporarily housing my PCP’s practice.

Rumi had it right in his poem that begins “This being human is a guest house / Every morning a new arrival.” I hope that my medical practice is a guest house and I its welcoming host, offering all that’s at my disposal to fulfill the needs of my guests: the distant, noble intention of a younger self; the years of study; the slow distilling of long hours of experience; hopeful trials, shamefaced errors; the battering by the inexorability of death.

“And how can I help you today?” I ask this morning’s first “guest.”