Family Practice… let them feel our presence

As I was reading an article in the national daily “Expert say patients at mercy of specialists” by a cardiologist turned generalist and had start preaching about the old days that when doctors dealt with their patients in a holistic way. What really hit me in the head was the statement “when what they see is the person, not just an organ.” Those were the same statements that define widely “Family Medicine” as a specialty, a specialty that specialized in the person or the entire human being may she/he be a child, an adult, an elderly, or someone that is pregnant and not just a single organ system, but it does not define what an “internist” is?, because by definition “they” specialized on the organ system or a group of tissue organs. Family Practice is to Family Medicine, instead of one field of study they are all trained in all major medical areas from Pediatrics to Internal Medicine to Gynecology, including prenatal and baby care. In the actual practice the Filipino Family Physician (Family Medicine Practitioner) refers patients to other specialist in 10 to 15% of the cases that they see. Did you know that the Family Physician can save you money? Instead of paying for various specialists for each member of the family, the family physician will cut cost since he/she can “care” for the whole family (remember your doctor or physician cannot promise you “cure or treatment” , but for the family physician he/she can always promise that he/she always “care” for his/her patients), in which emphasis is given in the preventive aspect of medical care which can save the family lots of money and headache.

What's in a specialty? , we all tend to forget that the patient that is in front of us is a breathing human being, then where is our compassion to care as physicians? Is it being hampered by the way we distance ourselves from our patients/or is it the tall pedestal that we stand in or just that in organized desk in front of us that serves as a barrier for us to reach to the patient, to touch or hug. As physicians why do we have to define people by their disease? Don't you know that being there is already a dose of therapy for the patient, lessen anxieties and loneliness which can be supported by strong friendship, families and a good community system. Don't you know that our learning to live cooperatively and happily inspired many of our patients to seek closer communities after returning home?

“Ever wish you could find just one doctor for the entire family?” in our dear days and times, with everything hangs by a thread and trying to stretch and resuscitate the dying pesos the statements surely makes a lot of sense. Gone are the days that your husband needs an internist, or your wife needs a gynecologist and our baby and two older children need a pediatrician, a Family Physician who is qualified to care for the whole family, a medical doctor who is trained in the specialty of Family Practice (Family Medicine, a three year residency training course after passing the national board examinations.)

So for those who are uninformed , Family Medicine as a specialty differs from the General Practitioner , that it has a distinguishable body of knowledge, a unique field of action, an active area of research and lastly it involves a training that is intellectually vigorous. Do I have to say more?