“Family practice is comprehensive medical care with particular emphasis on the family unit, in which the physician’s continuing responsibility for health care is limited neither by the patient’s age or sex nor by a particular organ system or disease entity. Family Practice is the specialty in breadth which builds upon a core of knowledge derived from other disciplines - drawing most heavily on internal medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, surgery and psychiatry - and which establishes a cohesive unit, combining the behavioral sciences with the traditional biological and clinical sciences...” (Part of the definition of “Family Practice,” as adopted by the 1975 AAFP Congress of Delegates) 

This week marks the third week into the rotation and I had promised myself to jot down some initial thoughts before I get too involved in the work. I've got three books that I'm reading daily (the latter listed is a good reference book): Case Files: Family Medicine, Atlas of Emergency Medicine, and CURRENT Diagnosis and Treatment: Family Medicine. The atlas was loaned by my preceptor with specific chapters to read. My backpack isn't as heavy as it was in the first year but the knowledge contained in these books is immense. All of these books together would be worth quite a bit of money but I'm borrowing the Case Files book from one of my roommates and I have an older version of CURRENT saved on my ipad. There are a handful of books I purchased but I'll mention those later when the right specialty/reasons come up!

Family Medicine has been a bit of a revelation for me. I had been volunteering at a student clinic for most of last year and participated on loads of health screenings to brush up on my patient education skills. I owe those experiences (plus my scribing experience) to how quickly I'm taking to the specialty. I've seen a range of ages (pediatrics to geriatrics) and have had to manage acute and chronic conditions. Even though it's the first rotation, the initial anxiety I had when I started has somewhat faded away... to be replaced with anticipation? Eagerness? The days pass quickly. I've been surprised on more than one occasion when lunch begins or when my preceptor tells me to go home already.

I enjoy discussing management of chronic conditions and finding different ways to educate patients on all manners of topics (safe sex practices, diet, complications of chronic diseases, etc.). I was lucky to start with this rotation because it's allowed me to refresh a lot of the material that was covered in the previous year. And it's sticking a lot better than it had in the classroom. There's nothing quite like interacting with people with the same conditions outlined in the textbooks. Suddenly, the diagnoses are more than a line on a paper: they're about stressing treatments, stressing lifestyle modifications, and connecting with the patient about the severity of their ailments. Touching upon safe sex practices has also been a common theme. As sensitive as the topic is, there's an art to handling the topic with people. Successfully educating the person on the importance of their health and their partners health is pretty rewarding.

With such an auspicious beginning to clinical rotations, I can only hope the rest go as smoothly. I cannot speak on the future rotations, but what I can say is that I like continuity of care. I want to practice medicine that emphasizes and maintains it. I think family medicine would be a good fit. Definitely some food for thought for later down the road when I start to consider what specialties I will pursue.