More and more about less and less?

Specialties and subspecialties are the order of the day. As a final year graduate entry student, I’ve been told several times that if I’m not focusing on my chosen specialty at this stage, I’ll miss the boat. Summer holidays, special study modules and electives should all be chosen with an eye to polishing your CV. It has left me wondering – what ever happened to learning to be a doctor, first and foremost?

 As our generalist skills are being eroded, so is our ability to treat the whole person – as a person. My attachment at the Peacock surgery taught me that good health (the presumed desired outcome of medical intervention) requires complex, multidisciplined, flexible approaches to individual needs.

The general practitioner is, necessarily, the leader in this approach. However, rather than viewing the GP as knowing a lot about nothing specific, it’s time we realised that intense specialisation is leading to a generation of doctors who ‘know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing’. Perhaps integrated medicine is having a little GP in all of us.