Internal medicine appears to be the last option of medical students when it comes to choose medicine as a career specialty according to a survey published in the September 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The findings were first presented at the Society of General Internal Medicine’s annual meeting in April being accompanied by a research letter about the salaries of the nation’s doctors.

The survey made on 1,177 respondents at 11 US medical schools shockingly revealed that only 2 percent of them planned to pursue careers in general internal medicine. Back in 1990, a similar survey revealed that 9 percent of those interviewed would choose internal medicine.

“It’s getting increasingly difficult to find a (family medicine) doctor especially in rural areas. It’s a tenuous situation as students look to careers that are financially rewarding because they have a lot of debt and they’re looking away from primary care,” Dr. Mark H. Ebell, the study’s author and a primary care doctor at the University of Georgia, said.

For example, medical students owe a median of $140,000 in student loan when they graduate.

There are many reasons for which medical students look away from primary care, starting with the long hours they have to work and the low pay they get for what they work. Many medical students are simply turned off by the amount of paperwork general internists have to deal with, a situation that doesn’t offer them a chance to a personal life. Many students today seek careers that offer them the chance to balance their work life with their personal life. And the thought of dealing with elderly patients with complicated diseases is another thing these medical students consider when choosing internal medicine.

“Students were dissuaded from internal medicine by their experiences with elderly and chronically ill patients. Other studies have shown that students' attitudes about caring for elderly and chronically ill patients decline during training,” the researchers wrote.

The new survey estimates that the US will have 200,000 fewer doctors overall than it needs by 2020, while the number of older Americans is expected to nearly double between 2005 and 2030. This translates into a crisis, which could put the US medical system and people’s lives respectively in danger.

“The United States is confronting a potential crisis in health care for older adults. Unfortunately, students were discouraged by the challenge of caring for the types of patients in internal medicine,” Dr. Karen Hauer of the University of California, San Francisco, who was involved in the study, said.

The American College of Physicians has supported the same idea since 2006 when it reported that the nation’s primary care system is “at grave risk of collapse.”