Saving Primary Care

We are two primary care physicians with 75 years of collective experience. We both are passionate about what we do, we get to know our patients well, we dig into issues and don't accept protocol robotic medicine, we typically offer a counternarrative to specialists, we are patient-centric and believe that patients deserve the truth about illness and treatments (no matter how nuanced and messy that is) and that they should make the final decisions, and we stress wellness far more than over-medicalization.  But our way is being pushed aside in favor of a number-based, specialty-oriented, over-aggressive dogma that makes the patient into an asterisk and pushes tests/procedures/medicines over holistic changes.  More and more corporations and health systems are using nurse practitioners to create an illusion of primary care but whose real job is to make money for the hospital or corporation.  More and more primary care doctors are either creating concierge practices that can help just a few who have money, or are being squeezed into 15 minute visits that negates their true purpose.  And virtually no medical students pursue a primary care profession.  We discuss all of this in detail in our book Return to Healing, and here we provide experience, statistics, and insight into what's going wrong and how we need to fix it.  Without robust primary care we will keep paying for corporations, hospitals, and specialist doctors to spend more money without any improvement in health or longevity, as every study and all our experience has shown us.