Forum for internal medicine: opinions and controversies.

1062 The lack of internists, or rather their relative shortage, is a progressive and, even worse, irre‐ versible phenomenon. This is undoubtedly due to the dynamic development of specializations de‐ riving from traditional internal medicine. The said specializations are attractive not only for finan‐ cial reasons, but also by virtue of the well ‐earned prestige enjoyed by their holders among both fel‐ low professionals and patients. In this context, a specialist in internal medicine is recognized as a physician whose competences, and hence skills, are not clearly specified. Such a specialist is per‐ ceived this way not only by their own profession‐ al community, but also by patients. Nowadays, there is a belief and a consequent expectation among patients that they qualify for specialist treatment every time they suffer from any symptom or ailment. My 40‐year long clini‐ cal experience has given me the impression that the subjective well ‐being of a patient is based on the frequency of their visits to a specialist, and not on objective treatment effects which translate into the broadly taken improvement of life quali‐ ty. I presume that this is associated with substan‐ tial deficiencies in the society’s health education, which is based on the premise that health should be regarded from a holistic and quality ‐oriented perspective. It could therefore be concluded that there is no part to be played by an internal dis‐ eases specialist within medicine as a domain so grossly divided into specialties. However, the mir‐ ror image of this conclusion is the fact that it is in such a highly branched medicine that a stable role should be occupied by an experienced physician, who is able to draw final conclusions based on in‐ formation obtained from individual specialists. Adopting such a solution would entail the re‐ evaluation of the role of an internal medicine spe‐ cialist with respect to 2 central processes: diag‐ nostics and treatment. Thus, within the structure of a hospital, an internist should be the person responsible for planning the diagnostic process. Through referring patients to relevant specialists FORUM FOR INTERNAL MEDICINE