Family Doctors: Images & Metaphors of the Family Doctor to Learn Family Medicine

Medicine is often learned through a mechanistic metaphor of biology and a military metaphor of war. However, the conceptual elements and skills that promote the mastery of family medicine, such as contextual knowledge, continuity of care, the clinical interview, comprehensiveness, coordination, and so on, are often difficult to explain and to understand. Furthermore, these fundamental concepts of family medicine have nothing to do with the metaphor of the machine or the metaphor of war. In this book, these concepts are explained through metaphors that are more explanatory, nicer, sweeter, and more playful. Thinking based on metaphors and comparisons is a way of making a concept so suggestive, interesting and surprising that it reaches people more easily. The value of family medicine lies in its distinctiveness from academic medicine; it is a unique discipline that defines itself in terms of relationships, especially those between the doctor and patient. Family physicians tend to think in terms of individual patients rather than of abstractions and generalizations, and family medicine is based more on the metaphor of an organism rather than that of mechanistic biology. Family medicine is unique in the medical arena in that it transcends the duality of body and mind. Thus, the family doctor should be encouraged to use a non-conventional form when thinking about the problems that are presented in the consultation (for example, thinking on the basis of metaphors).