I often hear people say someone in their family or someone they know, is ‘just a GP’ leaving me with the feeling that people think the General Practitioner is an inferior type of doctor in comparison to other medical sp
ecialities. This to me is like saying ‘ my cousin is ‘just’ a conductor of an orchestra.
There is a common th
ought understandable misconception that because a specialist knows more about a specific sub category of medicine that it makes him or her a better doctor.
Being a General practitioner is actually considered a speciality in many countries. Even in South Africa a doctor specialise to become a family physician i.e a ‘specialist generalist’ which does seem like a contradiction of terms
Being a specialist in another
field of medicine means that the approach to your patient is very narrow. You only focus on the problems relevant to your specialty. I have heard some specialists joking about themselves saying that if they kept learning more and more about a smaller and more specific sub specialty of theirs that soon they will know ‘everything about nothing’
It is true that if there is a complex problem that a specialist or sub specialist should be involved in the management, but the General practitioner should still be the one keeping an holistic eye on the patients health.
Let me give an hypothetical example:
I have a patient with bone infection.
As an orthopedic surgeon I focus on the treatment of the bone infection. This is a very serious problem and there is a real risk that the patient might end up losing the leg. Treatment involves a series of complicated operations, antibiotics etc.
After a while
I notice that the patients shows signs of a medical problem with his hormones. Who do I call? ( mistakenly) Not the GP, but the physician who again focuses only on his or her specialty, forgetting about what I am busy with.
So, as I am happily carrying on my treatment of the bone infection, the physician prescribes a drug that could adversely affect bone healing.
Now in an ideal world I should pick up that the patient is taking this new possibly harmful medicine. But I am so focussed on the complexity of the surgery and post operative care of the ‘Leg’ that I lose sight of the rest of the ‘Patient’.
Then add in some typical problems that arise when treating such complex surgical problems: the patient could lose his job because of the problem with the leg resulting in a mild depression. This could again cause the patient to lose hope and even stop complying to the treatment both I and the physician are giving.
So who is supposed to see upfront and prevent this impending disaster? Our trusted family physician. He who always keeps his eye on the bigger picture, making sure that we specialists don’t get so excited about our little ‘projects’ that we leave the patient out to dry.
It is then the general practitioner who keeps the whole medical orchestra playing together in harmony and he should be honoured as such