Physician shortage? Turn to PT's

Recently there has been much talk in the health blogosphere about the shortage of primary care physicians.

Is there a primary care crisis?

The trends from recent years largely held true in different specialties. Highly competitive programs such as plastic surgery and dermatology filled all of their slots, mostly with U.S. medical grads. Less competitive programs — largely those oriented toward primary care — relied more heavily on graduates of foreign programs and had some unfilled slots.

Unless the best and brightest physicians can master all possible diagnoses, and there are enough of them to cover all patients, you will always need to have some system of filtering and referral.

So if you want a guaranteed job go ahead and try to get into primary care... another option to help alleviate this problem in American health care is to start recognizing Physical Therapy as a qualified first line defense (direct access) for musculoskeletal issues, and recognizing the specialists within the field in their respective areas:

• neurology
  
• geriatrics
  
• pediatrics
  
• sports
• orthopedics
• cardiovascular/pulmonary
• clinical electrophysiology
  
• women's health

That referral system that will always need to be in place can (and is taught as such) that when red flags and yellow flags (precautions) are spotted, we as PT's will refer out to the appropriate specialty. PT's are now trained at a doctoral level, there are studies showing the cost-effectiveness of PT (read the comments too, well-summed up), and with the current healthcare crisis (and who knows what will happen in this election year), PT needs to be utilized to help improve the state of healthcare. That's where I stand.

And maybe even with the reduced load on physicians perhaps medical errors can be reduced.