The Physician Executive: “Many of US doctors feel that primary care is the choice of students with no other choice. Even Canada’s social conscience cannot mask the prejudice entirely. I was once recruited by a cardiovascular surgeon who said I was too good to settle for family practice. It is a nearly universal phenomenon in a world where progressively greater expertise gets more respect than being a generalist.”
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- The irony of Ted Kennedy and universal healthcare
- Medical students avoiding primary care, is it more than money?
- How Obama’s health reform will hurt Canada
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{ 5 comments }
Name one field where enhanced expertise in a topic doesn’t garner more respect.
stripping
Primary care docs do have enhanced expertise–in primary care. I am not in primary care and respect the skills of top general internists as the top of the medical profession. Of the top people in med school class, half went into high paying surgical subspecialties, and half into Family Medicine or general internal medicine. Of course that was in the “old days” of the 80’s.
Perhaps primary care physicians should be renamed as Diagnosticians. The ’specialized’ name in itself would increase our stature. Much of society’s preconceptions have root in language and names. Garbage men have been renamed to sanitation engineers and janitors to maintenance engineers. If an endocrinologist was renamed to hormone manager and a dermatologist to skin engineer, I expect they would garner less respect.
Stripping?
Do strippers graduate to lap dances?
Breadth of knowledge and skills at synthesis are minimal requirements of a good generalist. However this is not depth of expertise as is traditionally understood by “enhanced expertise”. All my skills are not unusual in an of themselves, but it is unusual for one person to do as much as I can do (of course I stand with every other primary doc out there).
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