Family Medicine — Fad or for Real?

Abstract

The growing shortage of providers of primary care, with an overabundance of specialists and high costs, owing to emphasis in medical education upon serious illness in the medical center rather than the ordinary health problems in the community, has produced a concerted effort to shift education toward primary care. One such attempt to improve education and research in family medicine has been in operation at Harvard since 1954. There are differences between primary care (first contact medicine), family practice (primary care by physicians trained specially for the job), family medicine (a discipline affecting all practice by putting ''the family into the center of medical care delivery'') and family health care (family focused health promotion and illness care). In training family physicians, as specialists in people rather than their diseases, education should stress the discipline of family medicine, the predictive use of modern genetics and the potential role of the family physician as health educator.