The Family Medicine Game: using humor to teach residents about endings

Graduation and the emotional process of termination are developmental milestones in the family practice resident's training. This article describes one example of a behavioral sciences curriculum, "The Family Medicine Game," which facilitates this process through the use of humor. The Family Medicine Game aims to kill two educational birds with one stone. First, a process for negotiating developmental milestones is actually modeled, emphasizing mutual sharing of feelings with significant others and ritual ceremony to punctuate experience. Second, the vehicle of humor, with its intrinsic palliative qualities, affords the expression of vulnerable affect within the milieu of a darned good time.