primary care vs specialist

What’s the difference between a general practitioner and a specialist?

One treats what you have, the other thinks you have what he treats.

With the current state of our health as a whole, specialists are an essential and intricate part of the medical field. However, general practitioners are as well. Due to the increasing interest in specialized care, many PCPs have taken the role of gatekeepers as a priority. There is nothing wrong with referring a patient to a specialist, however it has become a common theme for PCPs to concentrate on just keeping people healthy and relying on other experts for the acute care. So PCPs focus on maintenance and are all too eager to refer a patient to a specialist the minute an acute episode arises. In the past, PCPs were better equip to handle patients conditions. But now, because specialists are in abundance, it is easy and convenient to refer a patient out and have another doctor deal with the problem. The New England Journal of Medicine states that the amount of time primary care doctors spend in a hospital has gone from 40% a generation ago to 10% today. In order to improve health care efficiency, primary caregivers should extend their roles beyond evaluators and give each patient more continuity by working toward the fewest possible hand-offs. I believe this idea will increase the value of PCPs and naturally increase medical student's interest in the field.