Pablo Sisiruca, MD, is a resident at Tower Health FMR Program in Reading, PA. He is a 2025 recipient of a STFM Foundation Faculty for Tomorrow Resident Scholarship.

Dr Sisiruca's Family Medicine Story

Why are you interested in teaching family medicine?

Dr Sisiruca: I am interested in teaching family medicine because I want to leave a legacy. Your time in this world is limited. Legacy is passed down. It is your mark, your footprint and your contribution to the world specially those new doctors. There is bigger success when you lend a hand, and help someone else discover his or her strengths, weaknesses, and purpose. The best feeling the world was when I received thank you messages from students who went from significant challenges in USMLE board exams to improvement in their exams, matching into their specialty of choice and passing step boards. This joy of teaching is bigger than any monetary rewards. I am also interested in teaching medical students because it requires you staying up to date on current medical treatments and being humble to changing outdated practices. Seeing a student as a teammate helps everyone on the team learn, making the feedback and learning process more efficient. 

As a teacher, you are not only a facilitator of medical knowledge, but of life lessons that will influence your student becoming a better doctor. When my father was diagnosed with colon cancer, I had to take a leave of absence that challenged me as a person both professionally and personally. I spent time to take care of my father and at the same time had to work. When my students saw time overcome these challenges and match into residency, they knew that their problems goals, dreams and aspirations were attainable. As a resident, I still see that the most challenging patient-doctor interactions are those where the patient does not feel that they are being valued. The problem to that is even students and residents are coming to the workforce without having learned to rescue a “lost value."

How can you help your patients if you can’t find your value in the first place? For an example, if go to the store with a dollar, I can clearly buy anything equal to a dollar or less than that. Now, if I stomp it, make a ball out of it, pick it up from the trash, or cut it, do you think it is still worth a dollar? Yes it is. So if the dollar does not lose its worth and value, why do we feel like having no value after having tough or challenging situations like a broken home, poverty, mental, physical, or substance abuse?

The key lies in how we interpret our circumstances and our perspective about ourselves. I am interested in teaching family medicine because I will have the opportunity to teach “rescuing identity” and its importance in decision making and emotional resilience to all future doctors. 

Teaching medical students is bi-directional. We are always learning about our surroundings. As we teach students about medicine, they can also teach us or remind us about the enthusiastic first steps in medicine that led us to choose this specialty. The future of FM physicians lies in our hands. What better way of having the next best trained physicians taking care of us when we grow older.

How do you think you can make a difference in the future of family medicine? 

Dr Sisiruca: Making a difference in family medicine starts with thinking not only about what you can do to help your patients but for the future generations of family medicine physicians. It starts with keeping the mission and values of family medicine. It is my duty that future generation of family medicine physicians continue to improve the health of patients, families, and communities with professionalism, compassion, and empathy ensuring and preserving the human connection. We need to connect family medicine programs to outreach programs like the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, for which I was a past volunteer. The humanistic approach to medicine in a curriculum should be an important pillar in all programs. 

The humanistic connection to family medicine ensures that in addition to diagnosing and treating illnesses, we get to provide personalized care because we know our patients and families better than any other specialty. I got to connect with the patient, the aunt, the brother, the cousin while working as a physician assistant in Venezuela. Each encounter helped me educate families on preventive and lifestyle habits. It helped me appreciate the challenges that rural areas like El Pao, and people from barrios had. Barrios "23 de Enero and Santa Cruz" were the most affected because of lack of clean water, and the combination of violence and lack of transportation prevented many people from coming to the city to access health care. It was a privilege working with outstanding physicians and learning from them. This experience led me to reflect on the need to teach future physicians about the importance of health advocacy, global health, and compassion mission-based community work. 

In addition to my qualities of resiliency, dedication, dependability and hard work, we need strong leaders in family medicine. Most leaders are not born but are shaped by the circumstances. My personal struggles helped me see the world with a different perspective. It helped me appreciate errors and challenges as foundations to my growth. Many students lose hope, or feel overwhelmed by sleepless nights of studying, not making good marks, and many give up. I want to continue to be a strong educator who provides a vision, a direction, motivation, innovation, inspiration to our future generation of physicians. Everything passes, but your footprint of knowledge to others will always remain.

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Transforming the future of family medicine would not be possible without the generosity of countless STFM members and supporters. Through both member and departmental donations, the STFM Foundation is able to support the pipeline for academic family medicine. 

Help transform the future of academic family medicine by donating to the STFM Foundation. If you have questions about the STFM Foundation, contact Mindy Householder at (800) 274-7928 or mhouseholder@stfm.org.