Family medicine's identity: Being generalists in a specialist culture?

Abstract

Family medicine has been in conflict about whether it is a specialty or a generalist discipline. Although for a time the family was offered as a solution to family medicine being marginalized in biomedicine, a more biomedical focus prevailed. As a result, the practice of family medicine came more to resemble the world of biomedicine despite an insistence on the discipline's distinctiveness. Ways to avoid identity pitfalls in the future might be to seek solutions that do not promise to solve our identity problem once and for all, to refrain from adopting generalized slogans that do not encourage critical thinking, to practice what we preach, to accept that specialization is part of the American cultural ethos, and to embrace reflective practice.