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GENERATIONAL
PERSPECTIVES

some salient points continue — work hard, be nice, and to deliver very personalized care. And she will be leaving the kids
enjoy what you do. These are keys to a successful practice. I with a fantastic practice to take over.
believe my generation has shifted the pendulum to where we
don’t work as hard and spend more time with friends and My sister Anju is a Urologist in Salem, Oregon. My other sister
family. But I would like to think that this is not such a bad Kanch is a Pediatric Anesthesiologist in New Castle, New Hamp-
thing. I still wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning, and with var- shire. They both came over to spend the weekend with us in San
ious administrative meetings, I often don’t get home until 7 Antonio recently. We didn’t talk a lot about work. We primarily
or 8 in the evening. I have adapted by taking more days off just had a good time and talked about our kids and life in general.
during the week. I see this as something our newer genera- We never spoke about what our kids will do with their lives. I
tion is doing. We are finding creative ways to have a balance think we will end up doing just as Dad did. Not really say any-
between work and family. thing. Lead by example. And let our kids decide what is best for
them. This worked quite well for our generation. We will see how
When we moved to San Antonio in 1983, Dad started it works for the next.
a solo Gastroenterology practice. That worked well for
his generation, however, the solo practice is becoming
more scarce in medicine. After numerous additions of
doctors and mergers of groups, we are now 116 Gas-
troenterologists/Hepatologists under one tax ID. Texas
Digestive Disease Consultants is now the largest GI
group in the country. I am proud to serve on the Execu-
tive Board for our group. Coming together as one has
been the absolute best thing to happen to our practice.
This is a significant change in medicine as I believe we
will see more doctors coming together to form larger
groups. Although this may scare the older generation,
this is the future of medicine. You lose a little of bit of
control, however, you gain so much more. We can do
countless additional things now that we could not have
done as a smaller group of 9 physicians.

So will my kids go into medicine? I doubt it. My daugh-
ter Shaili wants to make a lot of money so that she can do-
nate it all to cats. My son initially wanted to play
professional basketball and then become a sports an-
nouncer. I had to burst his bubble by letting him know
there are very few Indians under seven feet tall who make
it to the NBA. I wanted to be an oceanographer as a child.
In high school I came to the realization I can’t make much of a
living looking at fish. I believe our kids will follow a different path
and will decide to follow my wife’s footsteps.

My wife Joana Gutierrez Ganeshappa, DDS has a much nicer
lifestyle with many of the similar qualities that draw us to medi-
cine. She is able to help people be healthier, make them feel better
when they are in pain, and she is able to do a variety of proce-
dures. It is hard to compete with this. I think Joana is still mad at
me for pushing her into dentistry. She was accepted to both med-
ical and dental school, however, I would like to believe she is
happy now with her decision. She has a great solo practice where
she can practice the kind of dentistry that she wants. She is able

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