The specialist of the discipline of general practice

Semantics and politics mustn't impede the progress of general practice

General practice p 354

Over the past 50 years general practice has established itself not only as an academic discipline with its own curriculum, research base, and peer reviewed journals but also as the cornerstone of most national healthcare systems in Europe. In so doing, general practitioners have shown that the intellectual framework within which they operate is different from, complementary to, but no less demanding than that of specialists. General practitioners must achieve a working diagnostic and therapeutic knowledge across the reach of biomedical science and must be able to forge effective and continuing relationships with an enormous range of individual patients. They need to understand the processes by which illness is socially constructed within the patient's life, and they must mediate between the patient's subjective experience of illness and the scientific explanation.

The breadth and comprehensiveness of its endeavour has made general practice notoriously difficult to define. 1 On p 354 Olesen et al attempt a new definition that …