why General Practice?

The GP's have a broad knowledge about all areas of medicine. Whereas if you specialize further, you will be an expert in your area, but you may have moved away from other aspects of medicine. Family residencies are not as stressfull as some others, and often times call is minimal and hours are not too bad, again compared to say, a surgical residency. Plus you get to treat a wide variety of patients and problems, acute and chronic, etc, instead of treating people with HIV most of the time if you concentrated in infectious disease. Hope this helps.

 

Shorter residency time.

 

Also, I don't know about in the US, but in Canada, FM is 2 years, and then you have the option to do an extra year of EM, which will qualify you to work as an EM doc in most smaller hospitals.

 

I might be interested in becoming a PCP and shorter training time is among that list of reasons. Other reasons are more personal.

 

I am starting a family practice residency in 5 days so I thought I'd share my reason--yes, mostly it was just one overriding reason, and that was that after doing my third year and hald of 4th year rotations, those were the people I felt most comfortable with-we seemed to have similar values, priorities, attitudes, and approaches, and that was very important to me, especially after feeling alienated in other specialties. I'd never have predicted it before getting to third year. I was leaning toward pathology or neurology prior to this. My grades were above average with lots of honors on my clinical rotations and good board scores so I had a lot of choices, chose Family and got into my first choice residency. By the way, at my school, the shortest route to practicing was Internal Medicine-3+3=3 years med school, 3 years residency for total of 6, while FP is your four years med school plus 3 year residency (possibly followed by a variety of different fellowships such as sports medicine or family-centered obstetrics.)

 

It's true, general practice is alive and well. I graduated from an American med school in 2009, did my intern year, and now have my own practice with hospital Priviledges and take all insurances. Life is great. Only problem I have had is getting Priviledges at larger hospitals that have Hospitalist groups, so they want to keep all billing for the hospital. I bill at the same rate as FPs, and I didn't have to deal with the extra 2 years of $5/hour 80 hour work weeks. I think that GPs will come back given the doctor nurse quacktioners, with on line degrees. AMA should realize that doctor nurses, PAs, are pushing PCPs doc out, and why go into PC if doctor nurses finish in half the time with their online degree? I say get real doctors out faster, GP baby

 

Yeah, usually you post this after someone else necromances a thread. Not when you are necromancing a thread with the picture.

 

Which school did you attend?

 

The medical college of Georgia

 

For anyone interested in GP, Texas Tech has a 3 year med school program for people who want to pursue GP. I think they also give a full year free tuition for this program. You walk out with have the cost of med school. Great program.

 

I'm not sure that I understand the point of that bump.

 

There was a spam post that originally bumped the thread. Jarudy replied to the bump and after the spam post was deleted it looks like Jarudy was the one who bumped it.

 

Also, say your dad is the best of the best in a specific type of surgery that he's got down to a science, and he's churning through 14 patients daily. That's when I would join his practice as a GP and help out the family business as first assist.

 

okay that makes so much more sense