Francisco Alvarez, M.D.

My name is Francisco Alvarez, I'm a physician in the lung transplant service at Mayo Clinic. My role in the lung transplants service is to evaluate patients with advanced lung disease that will require a lung transplant. I think one of the magic things about medicine is the human interaction with great people that you just don't know them well enough if you are just a Dr. I think I would like to become a friend and I would like to know the name of the children or what they're doing and how they're doing in college or school. And may you give me that time? If you look at the Mayo Clinic logo it is three shields. And those three shields represent patient care, research and teaching. And whenever I go and I say I come from Mayo Clinic, everybody recognize that as a marker of excellence. And when I first moved to Mayo Clinic and they said that the interests of the patients come first, I thought it was a slogan. As I've been working here for 20 years, I can say that it's not a slogan, it is the actual philosophy of the institution.