Patients sometimes wonder what the role of the family physician is in this day and age, where modern medicine has become so specialised , and technology had advanced so much. There are so many different medical specialists, each of whom is a master in his own particular organ system. In fact, lots of people look down on family physicians. As far as the pecking order goes, they're pretty low down on medicine's totem pole.
Because they don't have the depth of expertise in a particular organ system which a specialist has, they usually get paid disproportionately less, as compared to organ-system specialists. Many General Practitioners also suffer from an inferiority complex. They think of themselves as just being referring doctors, whose job is to refer the patient to the right specialist for tackling a particular problem. Thus, if the patient has a heart problem, he sends him to a…
