If you consider that an average primary doctor cares for about 2,000 patients, that adds up to a lot of people who can’t get a doctor’s appointment.
As a result, today only roughly 30 percent of physicians practice primary care, compared to 70 percent 50 years ago.Īnd although it’s hard to say for sure, most researchers believe that, with our expanding and aging population, we’re going to have a shortage of primary doctors on the order of 52,000 within a decade. West says the pipeline of future primary care physicians has really slowed down. “And current estimates are that that is below 20%.” “There’s data to suggest in the mid to late 1990s about 50 percent of all US medical school graduates were choosing primary care careers,” he told me. He’s a prominent researcher on the economics of primary care. To figure this out, I spoke to Colin West, a primary doctor and professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. So the question I couldn’t get out of my mind was why didn’t we go with the obvious choice? Why didn’t we choose primary care? I’m specializing in emergency medicine, and he’s in radiology. Ultimately, neither my friend nor I went into primary care.
I think I expected the same thing at the time as well, but actually, that’s more or less exclusive to primary care specialties. We read over his old application essay for medical school and found many references to taking long-term care of patients. Like me, he graduated from medical school a year ago and is currently doing his residency. As it turns out, there’s a longstanding struggle between these two camps, and a lot of people would say primary care is losing.Īs a first-year resident, I found myself wanting to understand why. In the world of physicians, there are hundreds of specialties-neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, dermatologists, radiologists, anesthesiologists…all the different “ologists.” But doctors generally fall into two camps: the specialists and the generalists, like, for example, your family doctor. Half the money and none of the respect, a first-year resident says no wonder new doctors aren’t choosing to be generalists.
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