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FUTURE Day 1 Main Stage headliner Marcia Faustin, MD, FAAFP: ‘Your average is everything'
July 31, 2025, Scott Wilson (Kansas City, Missouri) — Marcia Faustin, MD, FAAFP, keeps a high profile for a family physician—for almost anyone, really.
As co-head team physician for the USA Gymnastics Women's National Team, she helped save Simone Biles’ career. Biles’ teammate Suni Lee took Faustin to the ESPY awards last month and thanked her for treating Lee’s rare kidney disease. Known to athletes as “Dr. Marcy,” she’s also the associate team physician for the University of California, Davis, and team physician for the Sacramento Republic FC soccer club.
So it’s not surprising that someone would ask Faustin, “Has your life changed from being famous?”
But the AAFP member who anonymously submitted that question ahead of Faustin’s main stage talk today at FUTURE couldn’t have known that it would be posed onstage by Faustin’s husband, fellow family physician Toussaint Mears-Clarke, MD, MBA, FAAFP. Or that the exchange would draw such a big laugh.
Faustin fixed her husband with a look and fired back, “Has your life changed?”
By that point in Faustin’s keynote—a presentation titled “Be Average,” followed by a sit-down Q&A with Mears-Clarke, who asked his own questions, relayed some sent through the FUTURE app and then helped field some from the audience—it was clear that lives had indeed been changed. But the cause was family medicine, not fame.
Lessons from ‘Be Average’
At the heart of Faustin’s talk was a set of “lessons learned,” which she said were “non-evidence-based.”
“Connection is everything,” she said. In a message she returned to several times during her presentation, Faustin said she cultivated strong relationships and relied on them. “Family, friends: These are your foundation of success, your life raft when you feel like you’re drowning. When I’m having a hard day, I need people around me I love. But you must maintain connection with yourself too. Who are you, and what are your values?”
“Failure is necessary and a valuable lesson,” Faustin said. She recalled having “essentially failed” the MCAT the first time she took the test. “I was devastated, but I ended up in a special program that helped me get into a top school.”
“Never take no for an answer,” she said. Instead: “Pivot.” She said people had told her she couldn’t work for the Olympics, and she had at first spent “so much energy” on how to prove otherwise. “Instead, now I just say thank you, and I pivot. Use the energy you would have wasted trying to convince someone of something and look for other ways to get where you want to go.”
“Mentors help lead the way. They are the ones who are there to support you, your goals, what you want to do in life. And they love hearing about your successes, but they’re also people to reach out to when life is hard.”
This slide simply said, “Live in the moment (be proud).” Faustin was a good athlete herself before that drive evolved into a passion for family medicine. Her sporting CV includes time as a club gymnast, a high school volleyball player and a Division I track-and-field record holder who won high-jump conference titles for Loyola University. “But I remember feeling I wasn’t good enough,” she said. “I thought, ‘I should win more, be a better teammate.’ But 20 years later, I was inducted into the school hall of fame. I missed appreciating what I was able to do. You have to take in your successes, no matter how small. Like I tell the Olympic gold medalists: Be average, because your average is everything.”
“Self-care,” Faustin said. “You have to fuel your soul. You have to figure out for yourself what it is that fills your cup when you feel depleted. I go to the beach, take piano lessons, read books, do triathlons. Figure out what inspires you, because when you need just five minutes to fill yourself up, it’ll help ground you."
A conversation before Main Stage
Faustin talked with AAFP News just ahead of “Be Average.”
Can you say more about the bio-psycho-social model you cite in your talk?
It’s the idea that your patient is in the middle of biological, psychological and social factors that interplay. Medicine used to be about biology first: Are you having a heart attack? Do you have diabetes? Then, in the 1980s, we started asking: What is their psychology? Socially, who is around them and what is their community? So now it’s, if you need medicine, why aren’t you taking it? Is it because you can’t get to the pharmacy? Is it because you’re taking care of someone else? We look at all of the factors that can help us understand how to care for the whole person, holistically.
I think it’s the foundation of how I was taught, starting in medical school. I had an early mentor, a psychiatrist, who stressed the importance of teaching us this before we even got into the clinical setting. It’s at the foundation of family medicine that we not just treat the one thing the patient’s there for but instead look at the whole person.
You treat elite athletes. Has that changed anything about how you treat your more everyday panel?
The beautiful part is that it’s the same. Taking care of an elite athlete is the same as taking care of anyone else because the foundation is the same. We start with the fundamentals, and we ask how we treat the patient in front of us.
You’re offering lessons and insights to your audience here. What do you take away from FUTURE?
My husband and I were just talking about this. We were texting one of our medical school classmates and remembering that we all came to this conference in 2010. The friend we were texting was my roommate, and we recalled getting here and being so excited to be around so many people who had our same career goals but who also were finding individual ways to figure out how to be. We were all finding our individual ways toward what a career could look like.
I also remember the keynote in 2010. It left me so motivated, so excited for the future, so excited knowing there’s a whole community around you who will support you throughout your entire career. People have the power to make you better, and that’s what life’s about: making everyone else better around you.
That’s what I still feel about being here, so just to be able to give back feels like a blessing.
What advice would you give your 2010 self, knowing what you know now?
Be authentically yourself. Always remember your why: Why are you a family physician, and who are you doing it for? Remember those things and work from them in the way you know best, which is authentically yourself.
Audience reactions from a packed house
“Her story really resonated with me. Her background is unique but relatable. That’s what I love about main stage speakers: a story with a spark to take through the rest of the weekend and the rest of the year.”
—Taree Chadwick, Seattle, Student Member of the AAFP Board of Directors
“Dr. Faustin’s story is the kind that reminds us why we chose family medicine in the first place. She brings elite-level skill and leadership, but what stands out most is her heart. Her commitment to treating athletes as whole people—not just competitors—reflects the core of what we do every day. She’s a powerful example of how far this specialty can take you and how deeply it can impact others.”
—Derek Southwick, MD, PGY-2, Muncie, Indiana, National Student Delegate, AAFP Congress of Delegates
“Dr. Faustin was so inspiring. I really liked hearing her talk about her niche of sports medicine playing out fully for her and how she uses her family medicine training. We all can take from that. We all have our own niche, our own interests, our own patient populations we want to serve, and we all want take it to the highest level and remember our own family medicine training to do that.”
—Samantha Driscoll, MD, of Greeley, Colorado