Medical Education

It requires far more medical knowledge to practice quality medicine on the front lines of clinical medicine than ever it does in the specialties. The specialist's narrow focus limits competence in other specialties and the spaces in between. The education is all backwards, the primary care physicians need a more highly advanced more extended education. A six or seven year residency with a PhD in clinical medicine would serve nicely featuring a clinically relevant discipline such as genetics or epidemiology etc.

An abundance of exceedingly well trained family/personal physicians could solve most of today's problems, but large numbers of best qualified candidates could only be attracted if given a prestigious academic challenge with the rewards to match. The midevil medical school in Sarlrno, Italy 900 AD graduated medical students with a PhD, -- a just reward -- it could work today in leading medical schools and thereby attract the numbers and quality of primary care physicians needed to set the balance strait.

Physician extenders should receive much of the training family physicians get today, but never practice independently! The algorithms provided by specialty groups, burocratic planers, drug companies and best evidence can never accommodate the complexity and multiple problems inherent in the human condition: nutrition, environment, drugs, poverty and abuse. It will require a physician and a deep and shared relationship to grasp those problems and thus elevate the sad level of health that limits much of our population, our work force, our idle youth and many of our veterans. This unbalance, this distortion in our profession is worth fixing.