The Article in Brief

Background .

What This Study Found This essay describes the relationship between family medicine’s struggle for identity and the dominant American culture within which that struggle occurs. The author argues that family medicine’s history may be best characterized by core conflicts rather than by core values. These include conflicts between the generalist nature of family medicine and the family physician’s identity as a specialist, and between the desire to be a part of mainstream American biomedical culture and a part of the medical counterculture. The author suggests that family medicine avoid new bandwagons and slogans that promise to solve its identity problems, and that clinicians adopt a reflective approach to their practice and to the future of the discipline.

Implications