- Santiago Alvarez Montero: Centro de Salud de Torrelodones, Madrid, España. santiago.am@telefonica.net
From the beginning, family medicine (FM) has brought health care nearer to the population. A crisis in FM is a good time to look at the social expectations and to reformulate and to strengthen the principles that guide the specialty. An ethical reflection is presented on what to do from the microcosm of daily practice. Bureaucracy and trivialities cause a moral decline which prevents FM from offering the specific service that it should. Its visualisation as doorman to the system, a mere filter of banalities, an administration area or as a handkerchief for the system to cry on, draws a socially unacceptable caricature. It is vital for FM to reach an effective compromise preferably directed at the most vulnerable groups or individuals. But it also urgently needs a sense of recovery as an area of human promotion, in which the professionals do not lose their moral capacity to have something to desire, want, achieve and enjoy.