Philip Ferguson, M.D.
Indiana University Department of Family Medicine

I graduated from the Indiana University School of Medicine in 1967, still within the era of the “Generalist” or the old model of the family physician. At that time my colleagues were doing office medicine, delivering our obstetrical patients, seeing our patients when they came to the emergency room, admitting and caring for them in the hospital, treating them through the aging process to their elderly years and accompanying them through the dying process. I was privileged to be a part of that process practicing in a rural community in north central Indiana with a group of five family physicians. In the past 15-20 years, we have seen the role of the family physician evolve into more of a specialty mentality where we have restricted the range of our practice and have been assigned to the role of being the “Gate-Keepers” of the medical community. In essence with have been given the role of being responsible for controlling the escalating cost of medical care in our society over the past 15 years. More and more constraints have been placed on physicians to cut the cost of medical care but not enough emphasis has been placed on improving the quality of our patient’s lives. We are now standing on the threshold of opportunity to build a community of family physicians who will be responsible for reassuming our old traditional values of taking care of the whole patient by utilizing the concepts of Mind-Body-Spirit. Using this as our mission, our goals of providing the best medical care for our patients and the curtailment of the rising cost of medical care will be achieved as a natural process.  

I left private practice in 1987 to be a part of the process of re-establishing the prominent role of the family physician in the delivery of health care. I am privileged to be in a teaching position in the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Department of Family Medicine. I have never had a “bad day” in caring for patients or teaching medical students or residents in the 37 years of my medical career and look forward to tomorrow with the same enthusiasm that I felt in 1967 when I graduated from medical school.