Anticipating Uncertainty: A New Frontier in Family Medicine Training

Identifying biomedical, interpersonal, and psychosocial uncertainties in their study of family medicine residents, Purkl et al 1 give much-needed depth to valuable insights.However, while this study explores how the residents respond to uncertainty in a rather thorough way, a critical question goes unasked: Can uncertainty itself be anticipated?This is the concept of preemptive uncertainty, 2 which presents a groundbreaking opportunity to transform the way we prepare future family physicians, shifting from a reactive approach to an approach that may anticipate and preemptively manage uncertainty.