Family Practise Doctors Becoming Rare Breed

Getting a General Practitioner in the United States may become even harder in the years to come with only 2 percent of graduating med students planning to work in primary care.

Who will be taking care of the sick if all doctors go for specialties in order to afford their med school debts?

Almost 1,200 fourth year medical students were surveyed to see who will be going into family practice. Only 2 percent of those have that goal in mind according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. That’s 7 percent less than in 1990.

New doctors are wary of the paperwork and demands of chronically sick patient. As Yahoo reports the lure of bigger salaries and huge schooling debts is taking the family doctor away.

“I didn’t want to fight the insurance companies,” said Dr. Jason Shipman, 36, a radiology resident at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., who is carrying $150,000 in student debt.

Primary care doctors he met as a student had to “speed to see enough patients to make a reasonable living,” Shipman said.

Family doctors can expect to make about $186,00
but an Orthopedic surgeon can expect to bring home $436K. That huge difference in salary is cheating the public out of new doctors that could help ease the drought of family practice.

“Primary care is holding steady but only because of international medical school graduates,” said Edward Salsberg of the Association of American Medical Colleges, a co-author of the study. “And holding steady in numbers is probably not sufficient when the population is growing and aging.”

The Web-based survey was done at 11 medical schools that had similar demographics and training choices of most medical students.