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PCP Convention 2010: Medicine beyond Medicine: Traversing Boundaries, Crossing Borders

The landscape of the medical profession has changed dramatically over the recent decades. While the more traditional roles of health-care provider and scientist remain, challenging roles such as steward of patient resources, community educator, and patient advocate have emerged. To be able to fulfill such roles, we as today’s Filipino physicians have to be constantly aware of ourselves and our environments, define our boundaries, limitations and comfortable spheres, and be willing to go beyond them.

As internists, our comfort zones are more often confined to our own selves and our immediate families, and our own medical practice, be it general internal medicine or any of its subspecialties. The Philippine College of Physicians, hence, challenges its members to go beyond their comfort zones and extend beyond the concerns of self, family, or private practice, and be involved in the concerns of the community, nation and beyond. While there is an increasing burden of chronic illness and complexity of medical care, there is also an astounding development in the field of information and communication technology that has blurred geographic borders, enabling us to coordinate care across various settings and health care providers. While disparities in healthcare access among various groups continue to exist, the Filipino internist is given the chance to reaffirm his own relevance by becoming part of the solution to this inequity.

The PCP also urges its members to practice medicine beyond medicine – to scrutinize the nature and effects of the patient’s illness, to understand the complexity of clinical judgments and the ethical dimensions of physician–patient, physician-physician and physician-industry encounters, and to utilize the multifaceted dimensions of health to further improve patient care.

We therefore envision the PCP 2010 Annual Convention to be a venue wherein we, as Filipino internists, may explore our own territories, examine our own follies and strengths, and rediscover our own relevance. We will be redefining ourselves and our profession – beyond our traditional roles as clinicians, beyond the biomedical definition of health, beyond geographic boundaries, all within the bounds of medical ethics, all for the improvement of our patients’ welfare.  http://www.pcp.org.ph

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