From one to fifteen inches of snow blanket most of North Carolina.  The storm started Friday Jan 30 and continued into Sunday morning, February 1.  Hardest hit areas are the Charlotte area and coastal communities.

Stay warm and stay safe.  Remember that as the roads become passable, the most dangerous places for your patients will be the walking distance from home to car, and the car to your office and back again.

Although the in-person registration is closed, the virtual meeting experience (register online) is available until December 7.  A great way to earn more than 60 hours of CME!

Here’s the link:  www.ncafp.com/wfpw

In this October 2025 podcast edition, Dr. Thomas White and Mr. Gregory Griggs, our NCAFP CEO, discuss leadership, in all its various forms, situations, and life arenas.  Their insights got me to thinking about my own experiences with leadership.

In Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, Juliet Capulet says that she doesn’t care that Romeo’s last name is Montague.  She doesn’t care that her lover comes from a rival family.  She offers this famous phrase:

“What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

A heartfelt sentiment by a lovestruck teenager, but we know through this timeless Shakespeare tragedy, and our own experience, that words do matter.

In the latest episode of Lessons Learned – Wisdom Shared, Dr. Thomas White talks about the pervasive decline of trust in communal and personal relationships.  Faith in our bedrock institutions, like Congress, the courts, even our churches, seems to be at an all time low.

Medical and scientific institutions have not been spared from this global distrust. A few thoughts on the causes of distrust and what we family doctors can do to nurture trust in our daily work

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”   Robert Frost

Most of us physicians, including myself, have had a rather linear path to becoming a doctor.  College, then straight into medical school, then residency, then practice.

Looking back, my own training journey seems so clear and regimented. Any struggles I had were in the work itself, not in the career choice.  The path was clearly marked, and the hardships (and there were a few) were strewn along that straight and narrow path.  I never had a full-time, on-my-own adult job until I was 29, as a freshly minted family doc.

But some of our colleagues took a different path, sometimes multiple paths, before their FM career…