Being There: Presence, Trust, and Rural Health in North Carolina

To the Editor -My father was born in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky.As a child, he watched neighbors' lives cut short by diseases we now know how to prevent.He carried the scars of inadequate dental care for the rest of his life, a reminder of what it meant to grow up poor in rural America.Those experiences shaped his calling to pediatrics and his lifelong advocacy for children who, because of financial, physiological, or behavioral limitations, were too often on the short end of the stick.