Here I am staffing the NYSAFP table with Jim Mumford and Sarah Nosal, two family docs from New York City.

Every year the New York state Academy of Family Physicians (NYSAF) hosts a clinical meeting in Lake Placid that they call the Winter Weekend.  Family docs from across the state come together to network, attend clinical education sessions and enjoy the snow. The state Academy of Family Physician meetings are a great venue for providing non-academic family physicians with evidence-based reproductive health information.

We usually send our Falencki Fellow, but this year our fellow wasn’t able to make it so I went instead.  I hadn’t been for three years. I gave a talk on evidence-based contraception on Sunday morning.   The talk was well attended–about 30 people–and the discussion was lively.  It was mostly men, which is highly unusual for me for a talk on birth control, and they clearly were learning a lot.  We arranged all the chairs into a circle to make it a discussion (rather than a lecture) and thus more interactive.  We used the whole two hours and I barely made it through all my case presentations!  Many people came up to me afterward to tell me how much they liked it and how much they learned.

I connected with a family physician from the Tompkins County Department of Public Health who is interested in getting funding to provide teens with IUDs the way we are able to do in New York City.  Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a rural as well as an urban IUD initiative?

I also had a fabulous time ice skating on the Olympic Oval and cross country skiing on the lake.  It was the first time I’d been to Lake Placid when it wasn’t 20 below, so that you could actually do some of the outdoor activities!