Heart&Soul Primary Care Is The Of Medicine P
RIMARY CARE MAY BE well on its way to the endangered species list of contemporary American
medicine. A recent article in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine observed
BY BILL FARLEY
that while primary care – which includes family practice – accounts for about one third of the physician workforce, “Far fewer U.S. medical students are interested in careers in adult primary care than were a decade ago.” Te reasons for this trend may be
numerous, but, as Te Journal article astutely notes, they most often are economic: “As compared with graduates who become office-based generalists, those who become specialists, hospitalists or emergency care medicine physicians can often expect to have greater control over their lives, a wider variety of profes- sional experiences, sufficient funds in the short-term to pay off student loans and higher incomes over the long-term.” For anyone who remembers the
Norman Rockwell-esque “family doc,” making a midnight house call with his black bag, tongue depres- sors and stethoscope, this news is disturbing at the very least. To longtime Lowcountry primary care physician Dr. Mitch Feller, it’s a sad commentary on the trend away from patient-oriented doctoring and toward more lucrative specialization.
Tat’s not to say that Dr. Feller has any quarrel with doctors who choose to specialize. It’s simply that he has dedicated his own life and career to primary care and believes that the field he has chosen is the heart and soul of medical practice. For him, primary care has clearly
Mitch Feller, MD
worked – and worked well. Although he is only 60, his Mount Pleasant practice has already, in some cases, served five generations of local families. “It’s a heart-expanding feeling to
have such an ongoing connection to generation after generation of these families,” he commented. A native of suburban
Philadelphia, Dr. Feller was an excellent student in high school, with an interest in science. He enrolled at Franklin and Marshall, a Pennsylvania college renowned for sending nearly half its graduates to
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prominent medical schools. Graduating with honors, he earned acceptance at numerous graduate programs, including the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. At Penn, a well-endowed private medical school, the focus was on specialties and subspecialties, and its graduates were considered to be among the best of the best in every area. Despite this heady atmosphere, Mitch Feller felt something was missing. He knew he loved medi- cine, but he was uncomfortable with what he perceived as an emotional and empathetic disconnect between the physician and the patient. As a result, he dropped out of medical school, worked for several months on a farm in Lancaster County – a return to his roots as the son of Mennonite farming parents – and eventually hitchhiked to California. Once on the West Coast, he did “the basic hippie thing,” winding up in Berkeley, where he got a closer look at a different kind of practice model – one that emphasized primary care. Family practice, a new spe- cialty, was highly valued in Northern California, and its emphasis on the patient affirmed his notion that there was a better way to conceptualize the doctor- patient encounter.
Thumb out once again, he
returned to Philadelphia, where he was welcomed back by the School of Medicine and began a series of
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