Specialties

You may ask: Should we ask our professors to teach simple general medicine outside their own specialty, or to focus their tutorials on the cutting edge research of their very own super-sub-specialty of interest?

The latter scenario is, of course, not desirable.

But, neither is the former.

And, to go one step further, if we have to choose one side to err on, we should choose the latter.

Why? Because general medicine is, unfortunately, and contrary to the concept of most people, not a subject in its own; it is collection of specialties. (For this reason, neither Harrison’s nor other major textbooks of internal medicine has a section of “general medicine”; each specialty occupies a section of the book.) For example, there are heart or brain or gut problems that are common enough for all physicians to know something about – and these areas are therefore considered to be covered by general medicine. Nonetheless, these topics remain under the territory of one specialty or another, and, these diseases are, at least in theory, better cared and taught by the corresponding specialist.