In This Issue: A Cry for Balance

A large thank you to Dr. Stange for presenting the many views on the conundrums we face in primary care today. If experience be the best teacher, then many of these hard studied lessons should aready be accepted as much as they have already been self-evident to the many of us practicing in primary care today.

Issues of Annals such as this seem to oft raise the question of why bother - Why bother to study what we already feel we know when, whether objectively validated or not, leaders in positions of power outside of medicine do not listen? Why document the accounting failures of government agencies who push accountable care in patient-centered medical homes when they will not pay for the evident costs of said care nor do our Medicare and Medicaid so-called experts-in-charge listen to what they presume they already understand? Why argue rationally from our frontal lobes for comprehensive care and responsible reform when all actions seem to spring unaltered from our personal and societal reptillian limbi?

We academics may publish as singers may sing, painters must paint, and all organisms do breathe. This may be what marks us apart as alive. Yet as there is more to life than mere breathing. Smart, creative, aware physicians already know through experience much of what we repeatedly write about. What is the point of experience if not to teach us what we need to know already?

Much as the quality and importance of our Annals is clear for all to see, these editions of Annals raise repeatedly over and over again the question of what may be the fundamentally real, productive and effective role of the academic beyond mere writing?

Competing interests: None declared