Family medicine rocks!

Tonight we heard from 6 family physicians who have chosen to focus their practices somewhat. Here's who we heard from:

• One woman that left family practice to be a GP Oncologist at the cancer agency where she monitors people on chemo.
• A man that has a rural family practice who does maternity, palliative, house calls and the whole bit AND he's involved in medical politics (largely representing the interests of family docs).
• A man who used to do rural practice that how works as a hospitalist (from what I can tell, this is like the general practioner at the hospital who takes on complicated cases or any cases that no one else will own - often dealing with multi-system organ failure and the like).
• A man who previously worked rurally who's now focussed on Sports Medicine.
• A man who continues to run a family practice several days a week and also does cardiac surgery and loves it!
• A woman who does family practice with a focus on maternity care.

So it was great. It really showed the diversity of what you can do as a family practitioner and how much you can change things up over time as your priorities change (more lifestyle vs work or vicea versa) and interests shift. You can practice quite broadly, then zoom in on an area of interest (e.g. palliative care), then zoom out again later and zoom in again on some other area altogether. It's so flexible which is great for a generalist like me. I'm sold.

Of course I was the one to ask the provocative question at the end which was about financial compensation and whether this is major deterrent to doing family medicine. It's the question that all of my classmates have (since we're all seeing physicians in the community lamenting about this) but no one wants to ask because for some reason, you're not supposed to talk about money in medicine. Since I have a business background, some people naturally (though wrongly) assume I'm mostly driven by that and therefore expect that kind of question from me. Weird. I remember last year when one physician heard I had an MBA he immediately said "Oh, so you must want to do cosmetic surgery then?" Brutal. Obviously the guy must be taking his knowledge of business people from Hollywood or from the back of a cereal box or something. People are strange and disappointing at times. Anyway, back to my point. A number of the physicians chimed in on this question and the guy involved in medical politics seemed to welcome the opportunity to speak to this point. I was really happy to come away with the general impression that you can do very well financially as a family doc and that the government is trying to kick things up a notch for family medicine in this department too. It was reassuring to hear that needn't be a showstopper for me.

Anyway, I may have gone in tonight feeling like I was 80% likely to do family medicine, but I left thinking I'm 90% likely to do it. Not bad for a couple of hours of listening.