What is internal medicine?
One of my favorite bloggers (when I say favorite I imply that he makes me think!) is Dr. RW. He posted this question on his blog. I answered (in the comments section): ============ Clearly Internal Medicine has all the characteristics of a specialty. When the phrase primary care was first adopted, it had a different meaning then it does today. Because managed care hijacked the phrase and gave it a perverted meaning, we should no longer call ourselves a primary care specialty. Rather, we should recognize that internists provide comprehensive care. We are comprehensive because we care for multiple disease in patients who have both medical and social problems. One must act comprehensively to provide the highest quality care to our patients. ============ We must alway carefully assess the meanings of terms. One of many problems that our field has comes from imprecise terminology.
right arrow Herbert Kaplan 15 September 1993 | Volume 119 Issue 6 | Pages 541-542 TO THE EDITOR: I immensely enjoyed the article by Dr. LaCombe [1]. It embodied those ideals and goals that I believe are of central importance in the practice of medicine. The statement, “our profession is a way of life itself, nothing else comes close,” has already made it easier for me to handle some of the mundane choices of everyday “red tape”. Like Dr. LaCombe, I am an internist, but I am a subspecialist (pulmonologist); still, 50% of my practice is general internal medicine because I love it, especially when I see a patient in our emergency room whose being there seems to cry out, “What this patient (and his family) needs is a doctor!” I, too, practice in a small town, make house calls, barter with some patients (many of whom are Amish), and try to make each patient “encounter a positive experience for both the patient and me”. I do not know all the answers, but one thought that is always with me wh
