The title of our latest Medscape Roundtable---Should Internists Leave Primary Care to Family Physicians and Serve as Consultants?---may have overstated our premise just a bit. The question was whether Internal Medicine's original distinction as a consulting specialty is still relevant today. The backdrop for this Roundtable is the gradual devaluation of IM as a distinct specialty over the last two decades. It has reached the point where some have proposed the dissolution of Internal Medicine. Unfortunately IM's major professional association has been complicit in this agenda.
This was one of our more heated Roundtables. The discussion went off in several directions and at one point devolved into the straw man argument about whether one specialty should be paid more than the other. I look forward to a lively discussion thread over at Medscape.
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