The Resurrection of the Family Physician
After rotating through so many specialties and now halfway done with residency, I realize even more the value of the generalist physician. This may seem easy for me to say as a hopeful family doctor, but every time I rotate through a specialist office (currently on surgery), my belief only grows. No one understands the whole patient or sees the big picture better. The value of broad-based training is hard to measure in some way, which...
You’re Choosing Family Medicine!? Absolutely.
As I round out my 3rd year of medical school I, along with my classmates, should be feeling the excitement of choosing the specialty that we will spend the rest of our lives practicing. Planning auditions, finding mentors, and growing into the physicians we so fervently want to be. Unfortunately, this excitement has been tempered recently, as I have been experiencing less-than enthusiastic support from attending physicians who...
Baseball and Health Care: What Medicine Can Learn from Our Nation’s Pastime
Baseball In the mid-1970s, Bill James was a night watchman at a factory in Lawrence, Kansas. During quiet nights, he began exploring baseball statistics in a novel way. He wanted to boil baseball down to its essentials and determine what statistic(s) most strongly correlated with winning games. But just as with most organizations, those in professional baseball were not impressed with the unique findings of this outsider, and were...
Why Primary Care is the Future of Health Care
This post originally appeared on October 31, 2012 at Common Sense Family Doctor Several weeks ago, Primary Care Progress asked me to serve as one of their guest bloggers for this year’s National Primary Care Week, writing on the theme: “Why is primary care the future of health care?” I didn’t end up contributing a post, for a few reasons: 1) not enough time; 2) concern that the question was too...
Why Understanding Newtonian Physics is Imperative for the Future of Family Medicine
Remember Newton’s Second Law of Motion? To review, force = mass x acceleration. In other words, to determine the force of an object in motion, an observer must know the mass of that object multiplied by its change in speed over time. Now, work with me. Imagine that the force is that which will shift a vector and that the vector, in this case, is the incentive system that drives rational physician behavior. At the present moment, that...