To the Editor:

Jennifer Bush’s article “Family Medicine Takes Center Stage” [November/December 2003, page 43] addresses the challenge of making family medicine a more appealing career choice for students. We must remake the family medicine residency so that residents who choose to can subspecialize, as they can with internal medicine residency programs. Family medicine residency training makes a physician ideally suited for any subspecialty, whether medical or surgical. If such opportunities were available, family medicine residencies would be even more attractive to medical students than internal medicine. Once in the residency, students would see what a great field family medicine is and stay with it. Then we would gain many capable family physicians who would add to the prestige of our specialty. In its present state, family medicine is a choice with no outs and is scary to go into when you are a third-year student trying to decide which residency to pick.