A Tribute to Philip Quanjer

摘要

This quote from Albert Einstein seems a friendly way of saying that you can only learn, and become better, if you are willing—and able—to adapt, to be flexible. However, most doctors don't like changes. Actually, medicine is still a quite conservative world and flexibility is not something that is encouraged in our standard medical training! And yet, the paper by Philip Quanjer et al. in this issue [ped pulml3-0184] strongly suggests that changing to the new Global Lung Initiative 2012 reference equations1 is a very wise thing to do and will not lead to relevant differences in interpretation of lung function, as long as the previously used reference values were of sufficient quality (Hankinson and Wang).