The Dilution of the Family Doctor
It’s just embarrassing. Instead of fixing the real problems (pay, competition from LELTs), some medical schools are adding to the problem by SHORTENING medical school for those inclined to go into primary care. What a joke. Now you have medical students who are taking this career route out of trickery and bribes. And they will be less qualified physicians in the long run, which reflects on the rest of us.
Listen, The smart med students are staying away from primary care. The amount of uncompensated paperwork is horrendous. I have an N.P. and I have to piss on everything. Once the F.N.P.’s get the right to practice independently and have to do all the same paperwork, they’ll give it up and go to the specialty practice.
With F.P.’s being kicked out of hospitals, the only thing we’re doing is NP work and there is no use for family practice anymore. Look, it’s been shown when given a choice people take their kids to pediatricians. If given choice and access, women go to gyne/ob’s. To do ob, a generalist has to go out in the boondocks as the groinocologists will not cover them if there is competition. They may let you do all the public aid deliveries though.
NP’s have a purpose and I have no problem with the specialty NP’s seeing my
patients as they can get the ear of their specialist supervisor MD and get the
specialty care expedited.
The deal with a 3 year med school is you only graduate one extra class and that’s it. It doesn’t add any extra benefit. Putting more so-called MD’s out
in the field, they’re going to find out the hard way how they are so unprepared. Cripes, you don’t have to train them anymore to take care of hospital patients just let ’em loose. AKS
The University of Tennessee was a 3 year school until about the 1980s (I was a 1978 graduate) and since there were no summer breaks it worked out about the same as a 4 year school. At that time they graduated about 100 people twice a year. I was told that this started during WW2 when a lot of doctors were needed quickly. I suspect it was still going on in the 70’s because there was no lecture hall on campus that would accomodate more than 100 or so people. They went to 4 years with over 100 graduates soon after the construction of a new building with larger lecture halls.
Not to worry. Family medicine will soon go to a 4-year residency…nothing better than an extra year of infomatics.
Univ of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis campus, was a 3 year medical school for many years and transitioned to a 4 year school around 30 years ago for multiple reasons….students’ stress and attempt to raise average scores on testing on national licensing exams (NMBE and FLEX)are my bets….as a 3 year wonder, I must admit it was a stressful experience(I was 1975 grad) and I can only imagine the stress would be much worse now….perhaps I overcompensated having proceeded into two residencies (IM and diagnostic radiology) and one fellowship (nuclear medicine) after the med school experience. In Iraq, where I just served as a volunteer teaching high school after retirement from medicine, I observed how students were forced to commit to medical school around their senior year in high school, and where the brightest ones usually choose medical school. Later many of these student realize the medical profession was not for them, but they are stuck in it…mostly because of parental pressures from their teen years. My wife and I were in the Kurdish region for the 2011-2012 school year.
great feedback. TY!
The travesty in America is the requirement of a 4 year undergrad degree. Medical school could start after HS, with perhaps a prelim year, and then have a 4-5 year medical school. The docs would graduate 2 years earlier under this plan without the extra undergrad debt and would have two more productive years to contribute – and those happen to be years in the mid 20s where it is easier to carry a heavier workload.
Your tone suggests an even greater commodification of physicians than presently exists. Do I misread you?