The nice thing about family medicine

Today was great for several reasons. Family medicine is pretty straight forward and for lack of a better explanation; easy. As a medical student who is looking to be in the trenches and getting as many procedures as possible, it is easy to have no interest in family medicine. You may even call it boring. However as person who will have a job and provided for his family, you can start to see the appeal of family medicine. It is easy and has much less liability than other fields, you do get see a broad spectrum of conditions, there is a lot of area to grow, expand and even change your business. I am sure as the novelty of being a doctor wears off and you realize it is a job these benefits of family medicine would be good things to have. 

Let's just look at the variability and growth of family medicine compared to ER. If you are a family medicine doctor you can really pursue many different areas of medicine; OB (deliver babies), GI (colonoscopy), Pediatrics (vaccinations, well baby exams), Sports Medicine, Cosmetic procedures, etc. These are all things that can be done by family practice doctors and if you want to focus on one area you can do that as well. In emergency medicine you are set in what you do, there are not really many options to expand out into other areas of interest. You can't really open a private practice as an ER doctor or grow a business plan to make money in other clinical businesses. You are tied to the hospital for the most part. As a family practice doctor you can open your own business and grow it in many different ways without a huge barrier to getting started. If you want to do something like this in ER it is much more difficult and the barriers to entrance are large. You would have to form a large group and sell it to hospitals. Most major hospitals are currently serviced by a handful of large groups with long histories. So if you want to make more money in ER you option is to take on more shifts and eventually you will hit a ceiling. Where in family medicine and other fields the earning potential is unlimited depending on your abilities in business. However if you want to just look at national averages the ER physician makes quite a bit more than the family practice doctor. I have never been just average so why would I start now.

In family medicine you are basically seeing patients who are not very ill. You do have some sick patients in the hospital but many of your office patients are healthy with minor complaints. This makes the practice much easier with little liability. These are some of the things that I have to take into consideration.