Commentary on the Book “The Family Doctors: Images and Metaphors of the Family Doctor to Learn Family Medicine”

The conceptual elements and skills that promote the mastery of family medicine, such as contextual knowledge, continuity of care, the clinical interview, comprehensiveness, coordination, and so on, are often difficult to explain and to understand. Medicine is often learned through a mechanistic metaphor of biology and a military metaphor of war. However, these fundamental concepts of family medicine have nothing to do with the metaphor of the machine or the metaphor of war. In this book, “The Family Doctors: Images and Metaphors of the Family Doctor to Learn Family Medicine”, these concepts are explained through metaphors that are more explanatory, nicer, sweeter, and more playful. Thus, among other metaphors, the family doctor is presented as the genie in Aladdin’s lamp, as a drinker of Chinese tea, a classic painter, an explorer on a desert island, as a bass, a plug, a photographer, an historian, a person eating spaghetti or cherries, a cat, a civil engineer, a catalyst, a meteorologist, a detective, a fisherman rather than a hunter, a sculptor, a sea turtle, a golfer, a filter coffee, a diver, a poet, a billiards player, a mother who picks up her baby, and a nuts and bolts mechanism. Thinking based on metaphors and comparisons is a way of making a concept so suggestive, interesting and surprising, that it reaches people more easily. The value of family medicine lies in its distinctiveness from academic medicine. Thus, the family doctor should be encouraged to use a non-conventional form when thinking about the problems that are presented in the consultation, for example, thinking on the basis of metaphors.