Family medicine sees 8th consecutive year of Match losses

Lifestyle issues are a major reason, but primary care physicians promote rewards of their specialty and tell students they aren't always chained to a pager.

By Myrle Croasdale, AMNews staff. April 4, 2005.

Dave Winchester, a senior at the University of South Florida College of Medicine in Tampa, has heard all the arguments against entering primary care medicine -- the lower relative pay and less controllable time demands. But Winchester said he had to follow his heart.

"I like the intellectual challenge of internal medicine," said Winchester, one of 25,300 applicants to the National Residency Match Program who got their results March 17. Winchester got his first pick, the University of Virginia. As an internist, "you have the opportunity to do some invasive procedures, and you spend a fair amount of time doing detective work to figure out what is going on," he said.

Leaders in primary care wish there were more students who thought like Winchester. There's been a downtrend in the specialties that make up primary care in recent years, as U.S. medical students, overwhelmed with debt or seeking a specialty promising a better work-life mix, gravitate toward the subspecialties.

The results of this year's Match showed a decrease for the eighth consecutive year in the number of U.S. seniors from allopathic medical schools heading into family medicine. In internal medicine, the number of U.S seniors held near steady, compared with last year, as did obstetrics-gynecology, while pediatrics saw a small uptick.

Over the past five years, the number of U.S. seniors is down for all of the fields in primary care, although internal medicine, ob-gyn and pediatrics saw small net gains when including international medical graduates.