If any of the following scenarios appeal to you, you might be cut out to be a family physician, the modern version of the old-fashioned “family doc.”

• Imagine yourself as the only doctor in a rural community. In your office, you see young kids, teenagers, adults, pregnant women, and the elderly. You also work in the hospital—maybe in the emergency room, perhaps also delivering babies and doing minor surgery. You travel to nursing homes, maybe even to your patients’ homes. You see people of all incomes and from a variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
  
• Imagine you’re a doctor in the inner-city, seeing a similarly wide variety of patients.
  
• Imagine yourself going abroad to help train medical workers in a family medicine program in a developing country.
  
• Or imagine yourself being able to balance your work as a doctor with your family life and other interests.

Today, family practice is its own specialty. In the 1960s, predictions were that general practice medicine was a dying field. The age of specialization had hit, and fewer than one-fifth of medical school graduates went into general practice. Beyond that, the single year of residency required seemed inadequate in light of all the new information and skills doctors needed.

So the specialty of family practice was born. Family practice now has its own certification and requires a three-year residency after medical school. The demand for family practitioners is high in almost all areas of the country.

What’s the special personal and intellectual challenge of being a family practitioner?
More than other specialists, you are the one who will see your patient as a whole person. Your insight and knowledge will help prevent health problems as well as detect potentially serious problems. You will know when to refer to specialists. And your sensitivity to and understanding of a patient’s family situation, culture, and personal habits will make you effective in the treatment of even common problems.

You can also still focus on an area of interest such as geriatrics, sports medicine, or adolescent care.

You will have flexibility about how you work: in a solo practice or as part of a group, in an office or a hospital, or both. Working in managed care may allow you to better balance your work with other interests in your life.

A comfortable living vs. the “big bucks”? What about the “prestige” of being a specialist? And what about the big bucks specialists can make? If family practice appeals to you, these probably aren’t your major concerns anyhow. Family practitioners earn high salaries, although they do make considerably less than doctors in many specialties (median income for family practitioners in managed care is about $156,000 per year). But they enjoy flexibility and variety in where and how they work. Family practitioners are also the doctors most recruited by managed care organizations and for rural and inner-city medical practices.

So in this age of specialization, there are still doctors who are trained to integrate the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of their patients, who learn to treat all ages, both sexes, each organ system, and every kind of disease.

No one knows for sure what the future of medicine will be like for tomorrow’s doctors. But as you consider your own future, don’t check your ideals at the door.

Check out the website of the American Academy of Family Physicians, www.aafp.org, from which much of the information in this article was adapted. Click on “Students,” then “Family Medicine.”

Article courtesy of www.careersandcolleges.com