Marjorie Bowman, M.D., professor and chair of the family medicine department at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, ponders the current state of family medicine and explores reasons the specialty may have succeeded by 2020. Retrenchment Today History can always identify our past errors, but we tend to overlook what we have done right. On the other hand, our biggest mistakes on occasion result in redirection that creates our successes. Considering what is happening today in family practice, I believe we have hit a period of retrenchment. We have fewer students interested in our field, some residencies are folding, and there has been an anti-gatekeeping backlash that is directed at us.
Patients are clamoring for specialists and specialty care.
The AMA has taken back its support for the Archives of Family Medicine. I would like to think we are in a recurring cycle of ups and downs, that we are now on the downslope, even preferably to think that we have hit the bottom and are going into an upswing, but I have trouble convincing myself. We should be known as the quality doctors. We should have quality-based systems, we should advertise that we work on quality, we should publish on quality, we should find new methods that increase quality. We know that quality requires appropriate systems.