Shannon Brownlee in Telegraph-Journal | 'Are There Too Many Doctors?'

Communications — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:17:00 -0400

...Writing in the December, 2007 Atlantic Monthly, Medical journalist Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer (Bloomsbury Press 2007), notes that U.S. medical schools are planning to boost the number of new doctors being graduated annually by 30 per cent from 2002 levels over the next eight years...

Brownlee says the problematical issues are essentially two: new physicians tend to congregate in affluent communities offering a "high quality of life," in other words, places already served by large physician populations, leaving poor and rural venues short of doctors or not served at all continuing to go begging.

Secondly, medical schools are graduating greater numbers of specialists, but substantially fewer primary-care physicians. In the U.S., says Brownlee, "between 1997 and 2005, the number of... medical graduates entering family-practice residencies fell by 50 per cent..." LINK