A general practitioner (GP) or family physician (FP) is a physician/medical doctor who provides primary care. A GP/FP treats acute and chronic illnesses, provides preventive care and health education for all ages and both sexes. Some also care for hospitalized patients, do minor surgery and/or obstetrics. The term general practitioner is common in the United Kingdom and some other Commonwealth countries, where the word "physician" is only used for certain specialists and not for GPs.

Australia

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General Practice in Australia has undergone many changes in training requirements over the past decade. The basic medical degree in Australia is the MBBS (Bachelors of Medicine and Surgery), which has traditionally been attained after completion of a six-year course. Over the last few years, four-year postgraduate courses have become more common. After graduating, a one or two-year internship (dependent on state) is required for registration before specialist training begins. For general practice training, the doctor applies to enter the three-year "Australian General Practice Training Program", a combination of coursework and apprenticeship type training leading to the awarding of the FRACGP (Fellowship of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners), if successful. This qualification or its equivalent is needed to access the Medicare health system for remuneration as a general practitioner. Medicare is Australia's Universal Health Care system, and without access to it, a practitioner cannot effectively work in Australia. Most GPs work under a fee-for-service arrangement although increasingly a portion of income is derived from Government payments for participation in chronic disease management. There is a shortage of GPs in rural areas and increasingly outer metropolitan areas of large cities, which has led to the utilisation of overseas trained doctors (OTDs). GP incomes can match those of other internal medicine specialists, but not proceduralists. Many GPs feel that they are second-rate doctors because of lower incomes, less public respect than their specialist colleagues, lack of research opportunities, and lack of access to public hospitals. Historically GPs were the default group for those who had failed often brutal specialist training programs or for those without family connections to secure training positions for lucrative specialties, this is less so with the advent of general practice as a specialty in its own right, including a proper training scheme and certification process.

Brazil

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General practice in Brazil is called clínica geral or clínica médica. Any physician is legally allowed to practice without any training after graduation in the medical school, but recent efforts by the government, the Brazilian Medical Association and the specialized Sociedade Brasileira de Clínica Médica are trying to demand also a specialist title for its practice, just like for others such as cardiology, endocrinology, etc. The majority of Brazilian GPs are located in the public health sector and is constituted mostly by young, recently graduated physicians. The reason is that GP is not terribly profitable and about 40% of Brazilian doctors prefer to do specialized practice, instead. To do this, they are required to do medical residence of variable duration and submit to a board of medical examiners in order to get the title of specialist. Each medical society is in charge of organizing the examinations (which usually are carried out once a year) and granting the titles to those physicians who passed the requirements. The title is recognized by the Federal Council of Medicine (the Federal professional regulatory body), the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Health.

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All Family Practice Jobs

Quick Commute To Indianapolis ** Low Cost of Living With Great Earnings! :: Indiana :: The Curare Group, Inc.
JOB DETAILS Production Incentive COMMUNITY INFO Quick Commute Into Indianapolis, Indiana Top Ranked Schools With Many Area Universities Abundance Of Recreation, Culture & Diversity Water
Metropolitan Ohio Community ** Great Earnings With Established Group :: Ohio :: The Curare Group, Inc.
JOB DETAILS Very Competitive Salary Production Incentive Call, 1:5 Schedule Full Benefits Include Life, Health, Long And Short Term Disability, Malpractice, 401K, CME With $2,200, Paid Dues,
Outdoor Enthusiasts Paradise ** Great Earnings + Loan Forgiveness :: Idaho :: The Curare Group, Inc.
JOB DETAILS Competitive Starting Salary Production Incentive Loan Forgiveness Call, 1:6 Schedule Join Established Group Of Two COMMUNITY INFO Mountain Ranges, National Parks & Lakes Warm

Professional Issues

Texas Enacts Loan Repayment Program to Entice Primary Care Physicians to Practice in State's Underserved Areas
jarvantes@aafp.org Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500
Texas has taken steps to increase the number of primary care physicians in underserved areas of the state by putting in place one of the most generous physician loan repayment programs in the country. The program, which will be funded at $60 million on a biannual basis, will award as much as $160,000 during a four-year period to individual physicians who agree to provide primary care services in federally designated health professional shortage areas, or HPSAs.
ABFM, ABIM Collaborate to Launch Hospital Medicine Pilot
bbein@aafp.org Wed, 07 Oct 2009 17:00:00 -0500
The American Board of Family Medicine, or ABFM, has announced that it is joining forces with the American Board of Internal Medicine, or ABIM, to establish a pilot program for Recognition of Focused Practice, or RFP, in Hospital Medicine. The announcement is welcome news to AAFP President-elect Lori Heim, M.D., of Vass, N.C., a hospitalist who says she sees many benefits in such recognition. But she cautions that any RFP program that might result from the pilot should not be used to limit the scope of family physicians who practice the full scope of family medicine, including both inpatient and outpatient medicine.
AAFP's New Physician Workforce Report Represents 'Blueprint for Change'
bbein@aafp.org Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:35:00 -0500
The AAFP has sounded a clarion call in a new physician workforce reform report that recommends comprehensive changes in national workforce planning; specialty distribution; graduate medical education, or GME, funding; and medical education policy to secure a family physician and primary care workforce that meets the country's burgeoning needs.

Docnotes

FairSoftware
Jacob Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:42:42 -0000
The pitch: Start Your Online App with FairSoftware; Find iPhone Developers; Share Revenue .. an interesting idea.
Google Wave Invites
Jacob Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:03:19 -0000
Update: I have eight zero of them left .. happy to share to the first eight people who contact me in some way. Sorry they went so fast.
Madmen yourself
Jacob Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:45:32 -0000
This is silly .. I made a madmen icon of myself. I've never even seen the show (don't tell Melinda!) ..
Soccer Uniforms
Jacob Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:24:01 -0000
Cousin David took this great pic of Sam playing soccer today. His butt is now officially on the Internet.
Soccer Headgear
Jacob Mon, 30 Mar 2009 02:01:45 -0000
All of my devoted readers (Hi Mom!) know that my son had had his share of concussions playing sports. In the Fall of 2007, he landed on his head in a soccer game. Spring of '08 there was the baseball...
Spit Testing - Fun fact about Llamas
Jacob Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:08:53 -0000
"Spit testing". Bring the potentially pregnant dam to an intact male. If the stud attempts to breed her and she lies down for him within a fairly short period of time, she is not pregnant. If she remains on her...

medpundit


sydney Wed, 02 Jan 2008 01:22:00 -0000
Year's End, Blog's End: I've been making my annual year end inventory - deciding what to keep and what to toss. It's become obvious in the past several months that this blog is one of the things that it's time to toss. This will be the last post for Medpundit. Truly. Wishing you all the best in 2008 and the years beyond.Click to enlarge
Pilgrim Medicine
sydney Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:31:00 -0000
Thanksgiving Remembrance: Mayflower Medicine.
Genetic Prejudice
sydney Mon, 12 Nov 2007 03:02:00 -0000
Any Excuse Will Do: Any excuse to justifying prejudice, or to stir up fear mongering of what may come: At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal."We are living through an era of the ascendance of biology, and we have to be very careful," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. "We will all be walking a fine line between using biology and allowing it to be abused."We have been living in an era of ascendant biology since Darwin. Remember eugenics? Jews have been offered prenatal testing long before the mapping of the human genome, as have African-Americans. But prenatal screening is not quite the same as the eugenics movement heyday. So why the hyperventilating? It turns out that the Times is taking its cue from blogs commenting on studies studies like this. Well, if the blogs say that genetics justifies prejudice, it must be true! I never thought I would see the day that the New York Times took that attitude on its front pages. It must be part of their plan to join the internet age. Here's the part that's gotten the Times convinced that genetics is going to bring back the days of institutionalized prejudice:There exists a publicly available gene database, The HapMap Project, that contains random samples of genetic sequences from people in China, Japan, Nigeria, and people in the United States with European ancestry. It’s now possible to search the HapMap database for genes that have been linked with intelligence in published scientific studies. In this manner, we can determine if high intelligence genes occur with greater or lesser frequency in the various races.Now, here’s an interesting point. If even a single gene correlated with intelligence occurs with different frequencies in the different races, this alone proves that there are racial differences in intelligence. How is that? Well, the egalitarian theory holds that every race has identical intelligence. Therefore, whatever genes there are that affect intelligence, they must be distributed exactly equally in all human races. Once even a small race difference is proven, the egalitarian theory is proven false. At that point, it’s only a matter of determining which race has the higher average intelligence based on the genetic evidence.Oh, please. Here's a take home lesson for everyone on the science of genetics, and one that should never be forgotten - these studies are about associations of genes with traits, not the concrete coding of a trait by a given gene. Just because a locus on a chromosome can be found more often in people with schizophrenia than in the general population doesn't mean that everyone with that genetic code in that spot will have schizophrenia, anymore than it means that every sibling of a schizophrenic will have the disease. Ditto with intelligence. Ditto, too, with cancer risks and most other traits and diseases human genome mapping is linking to genes. The essence of a man is not written into his DNA. Here's another important point to remember - our science is still young and uncertain:These genomewide association studies have been able to examine interpatient differences in inherited genetic variability at an unprecedented level of resolution, thanks to the development of microarrays, or chips, capable of assessing more than 500,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a single sample. This "SNP-chip" technology capitalizes on a catalogue of common human genetic variations that is provided by the HapMap Project, which was made possible by the completion of the consensus human-genome sequence.......The main problem with this strategy is that, because of the high cost of SNP chips, most studies are somewhat constrained in terms of the number of samples and thus have limited power to generate P values as small as 10–7. In addition, most variants identified recently have been associated with modest relative risks (e.g., 1.3 for heterozygotes and 1.6 for homozygotes), and many true associations are not likely to exceed P values as extreme as 10–7 in an initial study. On the other hand, a "statistically significant" finding in an underpowered study is more likely to be a false positive result due to chance than is such a finding in an adequately powered study, and "statistically significant" associations could be attributable to systematic bias (e.g., from confounding due to ethnic ancestry, also known as population stratification). Thus, the sine qua non for belief in any specific result from a genomewide association study is not the strength of the P value in the initial study, but the consistency and strength of the association across one or more large-scale replication studies. Robust replication should permit the identification of true positive results and the weeding out of false positive results.In other words, take these genome studies that link intelligence and race just as about as seriously as you would take studies linking intelligence to sex, or that predict elections with brain scans.UPDATE: Best of the Web draws an important distinction:Note that "the presumption that we are all fundamentally equal" is quite different from the notion "that all races are equal." The former is a moral principle, a premise about the basic dignity of every individual; the latter is an empirical presumption about group averages in measurable traits. Someone with an IQ of 80 is as human as someone with an IQ of 120; and this is so regardless of whether the average IQ of one race is different from that of another.What worries people like those in the Times story is that racial differences in IQ or other traits seem to lend empirical support to racist theories. But those theories are qualitatively wrong, so that no empirical evidence could make them right. If all individuals are of equal dignity and worth regardless of IQ, then a group is not fundamentally superior or inferior to another group by virtue of differences in average IQ.It seems that some very smart people mistakenly think that intelligence is a measure of fundamental worth. Maybe they're a little too impressed with their own brilliance.

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