Future of Pediatrics Conference and Vicarious Joy

editor’s note

Mobeen H. Rathore, MD, CPE, FAAP, FPIDS, FSHEA, FIDSA, FACPE
Editor, The Florida Pediatrician

PUBLISHED FALL 2024 | Volume 44, Issue 4

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This past September, I attended the Annual Meetings of the Florida Chapter of the AAP and the National AAP. Frankly, I enjoyed the FCAAP meeting much more, maybe because the smaller size of the meeting allowed more time to interact with the other attendees.

While the Future of Pediatrics meeting has grown since the first meeting in 2014, which I started under my Presidency of the FCAAP, it has not lost its personal touch. I first attended the annual meeting of the AAP in 1987 in San Francisco. I was impressed. While the meeting was not as big as it is now,  I still enjoy meeting many friends and colleagues at the annual meeting.

I started to think about why I enjoy the Future of Pediatrics Conference so much, and it dawned on me that it is because of the importance FCAAP gives to and the presence of all the learners, medical students, and trainees. It is so wonderful to see these young folks so enthusiastic and energetic with their whole professional life in front of them. In my opinion, they are just entering the best profession there is but the best field in medicine. Looking back, I would do it all over again.

The medical student research presentations are fantastic. I never had the opportunity to do research as a medical student. I made up for that by doing one year of research at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in the division of pediatric infectious diseases where Albert Sabin once sat and developed the oral polio vaccine. I did have the honor of listening to his lecture once when he visited the hospital. Dr. Mary J. R. Gilchrist was my mentor and taught me concepts of research. She was generous and gracious.

As an intern at Akron Children’s Hospital, I completed and presented my first research project, “Neonatal Gastric Ulcer,” under the tutelage and encouragement of Dr. Robert Stone. The idea came to me when I was in the NICU and cared for a neonate who had a gastric ulcer. It was never published. However, I am still proud of my first real research project. During my cardiac rotation with Dr. V. V. Sreenivasan, while watching some tapes of cardiac catheterization with Dr. Sreenivasan, I commented that two of the children with Trisomy 21 had an abnormal origin of the vertebral artery. After some discussion, he encouraged me to look at more tapes and reels of catheterizations in children with Trisomy 21. One thing led to another and I did a, rather simple, comparative study and found statistical significance. This study was published (Vertebral and right subclavian artery abnormalities in the Down syndrome. Rathore MH, Sreenivasan VV. Am J Cardiol. 1989;63:1528–1529 PMID: 2524962. DOI: 10.1016/0002-9149(89)90023-4). It did not move any mountains but it gave me a lot of encouragement and satisfaction.

That is what I re-live with the learners every year at the Future of Pediatrics Conference, and that is what gives me a lot of joy. I perhaps live vicariously through these learners.