This book presents a pediatrician's spiritual odyssey into the heart of the family and is a remarkable work of love and dedication that honors the human spirit at all ages. This kindly physician - whose earlier work, Who's Yelling in My Stethoscope?, earned many devoted readers - brings us poignant moments, cozy chuckles and sage advice gleaned from his busy pediatrics practice.

With family doctors increasingly overburdened, bureaucratized, and burned out, how can the field change before it's too late? Over the past few decades, as American medical practice has become increasingly specialized, the number of generalists—doctors who care for the whole person—has plummeted. On paper, family medicine sounds noble; in practice, though, the field is so demanding in scope and substance, and the health system so favorable to specialists, that it cannot be fulfilled by most doctors. In Searching for the Family Doctor, Timothy J. Hoff weaves together the early history of the family practice specialty in the United States with the personal narratives of modern-day family doctors. By formalizing this area of practice and instituting specialist-level training requirements, the originators of family practice hoped to increase respect for generalists, improve the pipeline of young medical graduates choosing primary care, and, in so doing, have a major positive impact on the way patients receive care. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifty-five family doctors, Hoff shows us how these medical professionals have had their calling transformed not only by the indifferent acts of an unsupportive health care system but by the hand of their own medical specialty—a specialty that has chosen to pursue short- over long-term viability, conformity over uniqueness, and protectionism over collaboration. A specialty unable to innovate to keep its membership cohesive and focused on fulfilling the generalist ideal. The family doctor, Hoff explains, was conceived of as a powered-up version of the "country doctor" idea. At a time when doctor-patient relationships are evaporating in the face of highly transactional, fast-food-style medical practice, this ideal seems both nostalgic and revolutionary. However, the realities of highly bureaucratic reimbursement and quality-of-care requirements, educational debt, and ongoing consolidation of the old-fashioned independent doctor's office into corporate health systems have stacked the deck against the altruists and true believers who are drawn to the profession of family practice. As more family doctors wind up working for big health care corporations, their career paths grow more parochial, balkanizing the specialty. Their work roles and professional identities are increasingly niche-oriented. Exploring how to save primary care by giving family doctors a fighting chance to become the generalists we need in our lives, Searching for the Family Doctor is required reading for anyone interested in the troubled state of modern medicine.

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This book has tried to outline where we now stand on the issues of proper patient care. The authors have not wished simply to return to the glorious past but to identify what has happened to the old family doctor tradition and to find a way to salvage the part of that tradition that can insure that the wonderful activity of attention to patient first and foremost can be preserved. It will be a difficult task as the pressures are tremendous in the other direction. But it is possible to reverse inappropriate and possibly illegal pharmaceutical company advertising and physician payments, to find a way for government funding of education so that young doctors do not feel bound to financial gain rather than social responsibility, and to set up a structure of health care delivery that does not require fee-for service hospitals and clinics. We, as doctors, nurses, and medical educators believe it can be done. We also believe the concept of a doctor who is only interested in his or her patients well-being has not really died but has been put on hold by false advertising, short term financial gains, and technologytemporarily, we hope. Help us help your doctor to see what fun and personal fulfillment proper attention to his or her patients can bring. You can do it. Call your doctor!