Specialty Choice and Business Decisions in Medicine
The decisions medical students and resident physicians make about their future careers are influenced in large part by their clinical interests, life style considerations, and compensation. Today's health care delivery and reimbursement model seems to stack career incentives in favor of highly priced, procedure-oriented care, and the trend toward students' choice of subspecialty practice over family medicine, general surgery, general internal medicine, and general pediatrics supports that perception. This month's issue examines the ethical dimensions of physician specialty choice and the intersection of the profession and business of medicine.