Hi!
Although I will be a dental student in the fall, I thought I would share what I know about these two different areas of medicine. My husband is an internist seeing adults with various problems like diabetes, hypertension, etc. Choosing internal medicine allows you to specialize via fellowship training in many different areas ie pulmonary/critical care, infectious diseases, cardiology, oncology/hematology, etc. With family practice, you cannot specialize further.
With family practice, you do treat adults and can treat children and have some training in ob/gyn. From what my husband has seen, often family practitioners will consult him on really complex medical topics since their training is so vast and not as "detailed" as internal medicine training. He trained at a school with both programs and saw that family practice has less training in internal medicine b/c they also have to learn other areas as well. That is not to say that family practitioners don't know medicine, but they are required to know a little bit of everything including ob/gyn. I hope to not offend any family practitioners out there, just trying to state what I know.
Also, someone said earlier that internists work is hospital based. Well there are a such thing as "hospitalists" who solely work in the hospital who can be internists. Internists and family practioners generally have their own private practice or work as an employee for a group (that is what my husband is doing now) and have the ability to admit patients in the hospital.
I hope that helps to clear up the confusion a little.
