Family Medical Journal

Linda Cheryl Conley-McCray was shocked when she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, because she knew of no one in her family that had this disease. She had previously worked as a public safety officer for a large urban school system for over fifteen years. When doctors asked about her family's medical history, she could not answer all of their questions. When she could no longer button her clothes or grasp a pencil, Conley-McCray knew she must learn more about this disease to help her overcome it. She became adept at asking questions of her doctors, listing her ailments and medications, documenting her family's medical history to the best of her ability, and sharing this recorded information with her family. She encourages everyone to investigate, record, and share family medical history. Possessing your family's current, documented health history provides a powerful tool for your children and grandchildren, supplying them with information concerning what ailments run in the family. This will give them a better chance to change things about their health. The Family Medical History Journal simplifies the task of collecting family medical history and provides a valuable tool for keeping this important information.

An easy way to keep track of your medical records for years to come. The Patient’s Medical Journal is a medical diary for patients and their families. It is designed to help patients remember and organize medical information about their and their family’s past and present health. The information, once recorded, will come in handy when filling out medical forms for doctors and hospitals. The book is divided into sections to record all pertinent information, such as: A personal medical directory for information about health providers and insurance companies Past surgeries Major illnesses Allergies Vaccinations Current medications Lab tests And family medical history Once you’ve recorded your past, there’s a new section where you can record information for your upcoming medical visits, the purposes for the visits, and the treatment plan you’ve outlined with your health-care professional. In no time at all, you can compile a compact diary of your medical history for convenient use in the future.

Much is new in Family Medicine since the last edition of our textbook. For example, not only is the therapy of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) disease and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) much different than a few years ago; the epidemiol ogy of the disease has also changed and more than half of the family physicians in a rural state such as Oregon have already managed patients with HIV disease or AIDS. 1 There are new immunization recommendations for children and new antibiotics for the treatment of bacterial infections. Computers are bringing medical informatics and on-line consultation into office practice. Medicare physician payment reform is underway and the reality of rationing medical care has been recognized. There has been a recent increase in student interest in a family practice career,2 coincidental with a Council on Graduate Medical Education (COGME) recommendation that at least 50 percent of all residency graduates 3 should enter practice as generalists. Also there is increasing awareness of the need for a 4 Center for Family Practice and Primary Care at the National Institutes of Health. This all-new fourth edition is intended to present the scientific and practical basis of family medicine with special attention to what's new in family medicine. The emphasis is on how the physician provides continuing and comprehensive care for persons of all ages, with clinical content selected from the perspective offamily physicians. The format ofthe book, like the practice of family medicine, continues to change.

With family doctors increasingly overburdened, bureaucratized, and burned out, how can the field change before it's too late? Over the past few decades, as American medical practice has become increasingly specialized, the number of generalists—doctors who care for the whole person—has plummeted. On paper, family medicine sounds noble; in practice, though, the field is so demanding in scope and substance, and the health system so favorable to specialists, that it cannot be fulfilled by most doctors. In Searching for the Family Doctor, Timothy J. Hoff weaves together the early history of the family practice specialty in the United States with the personal narratives of modern-day family doctors. By formalizing this area of practice and instituting specialist-level training requirements, the originators of family practice hoped to increase respect for generalists, improve the pipeline of young medical graduates choosing primary care, and, in so doing, have a major positive impact on the way patients receive care. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifty-five family doctors, Hoff shows us how these medical professionals have had their calling transformed not only by the indifferent acts of an unsupportive health care system but by the hand of their own medical specialty—a specialty that has chosen to pursue short- over long-term viability, conformity over uniqueness, and protectionism over collaboration. A specialty unable to innovate to keep its membership cohesive and focused on fulfilling the generalist ideal. The family doctor, Hoff explains, was conceived of as a powered-up version of the "country doctor" idea. At a time when doctor-patient relationships are evaporating in the face of highly transactional, fast-food-style medical practice, this ideal seems both nostalgic and revolutionary. However, the realities of highly bureaucratic reimbursement and quality-of-care requirements, educational debt, and ongoing consolidation of the old-fashioned independent doctor's office into corporate health systems have stacked the deck against the altruists and true believers who are drawn to the profession of family practice. As more family doctors wind up working for big health care corporations, their career paths grow more parochial, balkanizing the specialty. Their work roles and professional identities are increasingly niche-oriented. Exploring how to save primary care by giving family doctors a fighting chance to become the generalists we need in our lives, Searching for the Family Doctor is required reading for anyone interested in the troubled state of modern medicine.

Use this Family Medical History journal to compile information about your grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren. Lots of unanswered questions? Take this journal to Thanksgiving, Christmas and other holiday get-togethers. Your doctor might use your family medical history to assess your risk of certain diseases. Go to your doctor appointments with information on hand, and look ahead to the future, when you may not be around to share this information with your own children or relatives.

This authoritative volume presents a the first major assessment of family medicine and its impact as a discipline in the United States since its founding in 1969. Under the senior editorship of Professor William Doherty, a nationally know leader in the field of family medicine and family social science, this exciting volume provides: An overview by G. Gayle Stephens, MD . . . . one of the founding fathers of family medicine The outsider's critique of family medicine by Edmond Pellegrino, MD . . . prominent internist and medical educator Achievements of family medicine and its potential in research reviews by key leaders Culpepper, Becker, Doherty, Baird, and Becker Is family medicine a genuine reform movement within medicine and society? Or is family medicine practiced by generalists who are out of step with the true specialization needed in today's medicine? Top authorities both inside and outside the specialty address the debate surrounding family medicine in the first truly balanced overview of this controversial branch of medicine. Family physicians discuss the challenges they face in family medicine and synthesize the existing theory and empirical knowledge on the topic. This valuable update on a growing specialization provides historical background as well as practical recommendations for the its future. The best people in the fields--family physicians and other medical specialists, as well as sociologists, anthropologists, and family social scientists--explore the major issues surrounding family medicine. How far has family medicine come in fulfilling its original mission? How has its mission changes? What are the field's principal achievements? Where has family medicine fallen short? What are the key challenges now facing the field? Among the specific issues discussed are family medicine and the predoctoral medicine curriculum, developmental assessment of family practice, polarities in the identity of family medicine, family medicine as a biopsychosocial discipline, family medicine from a consumer's perspective, and much more.