Family Doctors Say Goodbye

This book considers the family doctor relationship and the process of ending that relationship. What happens when a family doctor or someone like them, deeply committed to long-term relationships, decides to end those commitments?  What’s involved?  What are the embodied experiences for doctor and patient, for doctor and staff, for physician leader and others?  What comes next?  This book invites the reader to immerse in personal stories and reflections of family physicians who choose to retire from practice, depart long-standing leadership roles, or shift from one place of deep relational commitments to something else.  These stories concern the particulars of family medicine and general practice, but they share much with any vocation rooted in the duties, challenges, and rewards of relationships bound by covenant and not transaction. This book is relevant to all professionals involved in healing relationships.

Lucy M. Candib

Lucy M. Candib MD, is Professor Emerita of the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. She practiced full spectrum family medicine with obstetrics for 40 years at Family Health Center of Worcester, a neighborhood health center serving low-income families including immigrants and refugees. After retiring from clinical care in 2016, Dr. Candib continued to precept residents and students until the COVID-19 pandemic. Working with medical students, she currently performs medical evaluations for persons seeking asylum in the U.S. Dr. Candib has lectured widely on topics of sexual abuse and violence against women and has drawn attention to the challenges facing women trainees. In her book, Medicine and the Family: A Feminist Perspective, Dr. Candib offered a feminist approach to family medicine theory and practice. Dr. Candib received a Fulbright scholarship in 1995 to teach family medicine in Ecuador. She received the World Five-Star Doctor Award in 2013 from WONCA, the World Organization of Family Doctors. Within WONCA, Dr. Candib has represented the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, served as a member of the Organizational Equity Committee, and currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Working Party on Women and Family Medicine.

William L. Miller

Lives unfold as stories and mine celebrates wonder, surprise, justice, and adventure.

William L. Miller is a retired family physician, medical anthropologist and Chair Emeritus at Lehigh Valley Health Network in the Lehigh River watershed of eastern Pennsylvania with more than three decades of collaborative mixed methods explorations of healing relationships, the general practice environments where they develop and how to improve them. Along with his friend, Ben Crabtree, he was awarded the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine 2014 Curtis Hames Research Award. Working with others, Will has co-created innovative research methods and educational programs, founded a new academic community hospital-based department of family medicine with over 200 family physicians and their practices while also serving on national level committees and boards. His current work seeks to re-imagine general practice and primary medical care for the future and mentoring the next generation of family medicine leaders along with being an organizational rascal, occasional coyote, and grandfather.