Friday, October 31, 2008

Internal Medicine is on life support

---and there’s no sign of it getting better any time soon. DB has written another excellent post on the importance of Internal Medicine. He concludes with:

I hope that CMS will reconsider the current freeze on funding new positions for residency training. Increasing medical school positions and moving towards universal coverage will accomplish little if we do not have the right number of the right types of physicians. This unknown crisis in health care is not often addressed. I hope other internal medicine bloggers will join me in leading the process of explicating and championing this problem. So to Happy, RW, Kevin and others - pile on.

OK, I’ll pile on with this---

Among the many reasons for the decline of General Internal Medicine are these:

General Internists are among the poorest paid physicians in all of medicine.

Our most influential professional organization can come up with nothing better to promote our field than “Doctors for Adults.”

A proposal is on the table to phase out our specialty in the next 10-20 years.

Who in their right mind would sign up for that?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Life Support implies that someone is doing something for the patient; that's not the case here. Family and Internal medicine are bleeding to death with no support beyond lip service.

Anonymous said...

How many IM (or, for that matter, FP) residency programs don't fill each year?

The first step isn't adding more programs, it's filling those empty slots.

Anonymous said...

The kicker is the phase out proposal. It is like being told that your company is going out of business and there will be no severance package. Thanks for going through training for several years, your services won't be needed any more.