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 this September 2025 podcast, Dr. Thomas White explores the multiple meanings and implications of the term Primary Care Provider. Or, as we Americans and medical folks often abbreviate, the PCP.
I have some thoughts about the term and its casually used acronym. Dr. White and his guests do a great job discussing many pros and cons of “primary care provider”. They agree that the words “primary” and “care” are core tenets of Family Medicine. We can all agree on that.
The problem is the word “provider”. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet laments, “Ay, there’s the rub!” (We sure owe ‘ole Will a lot for our colorful language). Provider is a big, generic basket that tends to separate us Family Medicine MD’s and DO’s away from our medical school colleagues. I am a residency-trained physician, who went through four rigorous years of medical education alongside my fellow students, who happened to go into other physician fields like radiology, anesthesiology and cardiology. I don’t hear or read about a radiologist being called an x-ray provider, or a cardiologist called a heart provider. I happen to know that our podcast host, Dr. White, was at the head of his class at Duke Med School, AOA. He chose Family Medicine, and was trained by one of the most revered physicians I’ve ever known, Dr. David Citron. We called Dr. Citron the Yoda of Medicine, a humble soft-spoken, but monumentally wise medical Jedi Knight. Dr. Citron was not a provider. He was a doctor’s Doctor.
So, call us doctors of medicine. Call us physicians. We’ve earned it.
I’m retired now but I still feel so proud of my career as a Family Physician. The insurance company may have called me a PCP. The PA who writes the note for the cardiologist may have referred to me as a PCP.
But I sure know what my patients called me: “My Doctor”.