Last summer, a Policy One-Pager produced by the Robert Graham Center reported that the percentage of the active U.S. physician workforce in primary care practice declined from 32 percent in 2010 to 30 percent in 2018. Although family physicians represent 4 in 10 primary care physicians, in several states a large percentage of family physicians are older than 55 years and anticipated to transition to part-time practice or retire by 2030. The immediate prospects for replacing them are poor. Graduates of 14 U.S. allopathic medical schools that were newly accredited since 2002 and had at least one graduating class by 2015 were actually 40 percent less likely to enter family medicine than graduates of the 118 previously existing schools.
Recognizing the imperative to not only maintain, but expand the family medicine workforce to meet the population's needs, the Workforce and Education Development team of Family Medicine for America's Health recommended adoption of a shared aim known as 25 x 2030: to increase the percentage of U.S. medical students choosing family medicine from 12% to 25% by the year 2030. Supported by the American Academy of Family Physicians and seven other national and international family medicine organizations, the America Needs More Family Doctors: 25 x 2030 collaborative was officially launched in August 2018.
In an editorial in the January 15 issue of American Family Physician, Dr. Jacob Prunuske, a member of the 25 x 2030 Steering Committee, described the collaborative's guiding principles, benefits to physicians at all levels of experience, and how family doctors in the trenches can support progress toward this ambitious aim:
Recruit before medical school. Encourage children and young adults to not only go to medical school, but to become a family doctor. Active recruitment is especially valuable in underserved or rural communities and for those underrepresented in medicine.
Change the medical school experience. When you have the opportunity to work with medical students, say yes. If you must say no, reflect on what it would take to get you to say yes, and share your reflections with your health care system, institution, or the 25 × 2030 working groups so that they can address barriers to teaching. As preceptors for medical students, family doctors not only teach family medicine principles, but also serve as mentors and role models. Embrace this role. Debunk myths and counter negative stereotypes of family medicine. Family doctors provide high-value care by delivering high-quality outcomes while controlling costs. Medical students need this experience with practicing family doctors to combat the alternative messages of other specialties.
Advocate for family medicine. Legislative leaders need to hear about the value of family medicine from voters. Respond to advocacy calls, and advocate at the local, state, and national levels for changes that support family medicine. Share your advocacy efforts with your patients and tell them why these issues matter to you, them, and all of us.
Embrace change. Patient expectations, technology, and health systems will evolve. Rather than react, help guide these changes to fit the principles of family medicine.
An excellent resource for interested medical students is a 2016 AFP article, "Responses to Medical Students' Frequently Asked Questions About Family Medicine," which answers common questions about the importance of the specialty, residency and fellowship training, procedural skills and scope of practice, economic realities, and future prospects. The article advised students that "the best way to know if family medicine is the right fit for you is to work with family physicians in action, by doing a rotation with a family physician in practice." The trouble with this advice, though, is that a lot of my colleagues are unhappy or just plain miserable, worn down by caring for too many patients in too little time and being consumed by tedious "desktop medicine" tasks rather than the face-to-face interactions that are the reason they went into primary care in the first place. To recruit more students into family medicine, we will need to make dramatic changes to unhealthy and unsustainable work environments. In my next post, I'll write about one change that is restoring family physicians' joy in practice and is attracting medical student interest in droves.
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A different version of this post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
Monday, January 27, 2020
Monday, January 20, 2020
Age-related low testosterone has limited treatment indications
Is age-related low testosterone normal or a disease? If it is a disease, what are the benefits and harms of testosterone therapy? A previous AFP Community Blog post reviewed the controversy surrounding screening for low testosterone in older men and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's requirement that prescription testosterone product labeling include warnings about a possible increased risk of heart attacks and strokes. A recent analysis of Medicare data found that testosterone prescribing peaked in 2013 and has since declined, but that prescribing rates were actually higher for men with coronary artery disease (CAD) than men without CAD. Meanwhile, another study suggested that men prescribed testosterone therapy have an increased risk of developing venous thromboembolism (blood clots in the legs or arms that can migrate to the lungs) in the first 6 months of use.
Earlier this month, the American College of Physicians (ACP) published a clinical practice guideline, endorsed by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), to provide evidence-based recommendations for primary care and subspecialist clinicians on treatment of men with age-related low testosterone. Based on an independent systematic review of the efficacy and safety of testosterone treatment, the ACP and AAFP suggested that clinicians discuss potential benefits, harms and costs of therapy with patients with age-related low testosterone and sexual dysfunction. The guideline recommended against initiating testosterone treatment for the purpose of improving energy, vitality, physical function, or cognition, due to the lack of benefits in randomized trials. Since some men will not respond to treatment, the guideline suggested re-evaluating symptoms within 12 months of initiating testosterone therapy, and discontinuing treatment if sexual function does not improve.
Studies assessing patient preferences reviewed by the ACP showed mixed preferences for injectable versus topical testosterone; the most bothersome symptoms were erectile dysfunction, decreased sex drive, and loss of energy; and high therapy discontinuation rates in two studies (30 and 62 percent). Since transdermal testosterone costs an average of 14 times as much as intramuscular ($2135 vs. $156 for a year's supply in 2016, respectively) and has similar clinical effects and harms, the ACP and AAFP suggested considering intramuscular rather than transdermal formulations.
Testosterone therapy has a vocal online constituency that holds strong beliefs in its effectiveness despite contradictory evidence, as I learned when I advised against its widespread prescribing in a Medscape commentary a few years ago. Although the ACP guideline did not directly address the relatively common phenomenon of testosterone treatment in men without low testosterone levels, the American Society of Clinical Pathology, the American Urological Association, and the Endocrine Society have all advised against this type of prescribing to improve erectile dysfunction or any other symptom.
**
This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
Earlier this month, the American College of Physicians (ACP) published a clinical practice guideline, endorsed by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), to provide evidence-based recommendations for primary care and subspecialist clinicians on treatment of men with age-related low testosterone. Based on an independent systematic review of the efficacy and safety of testosterone treatment, the ACP and AAFP suggested that clinicians discuss potential benefits, harms and costs of therapy with patients with age-related low testosterone and sexual dysfunction. The guideline recommended against initiating testosterone treatment for the purpose of improving energy, vitality, physical function, or cognition, due to the lack of benefits in randomized trials. Since some men will not respond to treatment, the guideline suggested re-evaluating symptoms within 12 months of initiating testosterone therapy, and discontinuing treatment if sexual function does not improve.
Studies assessing patient preferences reviewed by the ACP showed mixed preferences for injectable versus topical testosterone; the most bothersome symptoms were erectile dysfunction, decreased sex drive, and loss of energy; and high therapy discontinuation rates in two studies (30 and 62 percent). Since transdermal testosterone costs an average of 14 times as much as intramuscular ($2135 vs. $156 for a year's supply in 2016, respectively) and has similar clinical effects and harms, the ACP and AAFP suggested considering intramuscular rather than transdermal formulations.
Testosterone therapy has a vocal online constituency that holds strong beliefs in its effectiveness despite contradictory evidence, as I learned when I advised against its widespread prescribing in a Medscape commentary a few years ago. Although the ACP guideline did not directly address the relatively common phenomenon of testosterone treatment in men without low testosterone levels, the American Society of Clinical Pathology, the American Urological Association, and the Endocrine Society have all advised against this type of prescribing to improve erectile dysfunction or any other symptom.
**
This post first appeared on the AFP Community Blog.
Wednesday, January 15, 2020
When a cancer diagnosis predicts future good health
The American Cancer Society recently reported the largest recorded one-year decline in the U.S. cancer death rate (2.2 percent) from 2016 to 2017, driven by lower lung cancer and melanoma mortality. Although the relative contributions of screening / early detection, changes in risk factors (e.g., smoking, sunscreen use), and new cancer therapies can be debated, the continuing decline is positive for these patients, even in the context of troubling increases in overall death rates.
Despite this apparent progress, hardly anyone would call a cancer diagnosis "good news." But as my longtime readers know, all cancers are hardly created equal. Some are almost invariably lethal, some are "cancer" in name only, and most reside somewhere in between. A less heralded research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine in December presented relative and disease-specific survival statistics of 10 early-stage cancers in three illustrative graphs. (I wish that I could reproduce the figures here, but the American Medical Association takes copyright infringement quite seriously and requests prohibitive fees for reprinting its content, even if the data are derived from a public source such as the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance Epidemiology End Results (SEER) registry - which these are.)
Dr. Andrea Marcadis and colleagues found three patterns in the SEER data from 2004 to 2015. The first one you might expect: for early oral cavity/pharyngeal, bladder, and lung/bronchus cancers, relative survival (comparing survival of a cancer population to that of a matched population without cancer) was worse than disease-specific survival (the proportion of patients not dying of their cancer), likely related to a higher smoking prevalence in these patients. The second pattern, which held true for testicular and pancreatic cancer, showed relative survival that was similar to disease-specific survival, even though the prognosis of testicular cancer is generally excellent, while the prognosis of pancreatic cancer is usually terrible.
The third pattern was the most interesting: for early prostate, breast (including ductal carcinoma in situ, which was considered separately), thyroid cancer, and melanoma, relative survival was not only better than disease-specific survival, but greater than 100%. In other words, patients with these particular early cancer types were more likely to survive than similar individuals without cancer.
How can a cancer diagnosis possibly predict future good health? The answer emerges from what these cancers have in common that the others don't: we screen patients for them, even though the evidence of net screening benefit varies quite markedly. Patients who undergo regular screening are also more likely to follow their doctors' advice and practice other health-enhancing behaviors. The researchers noted:
These statistics can help physicians explain to certain patients that their actions prior to diagnosis may mean more for their survival than the diagnosis itself. This may be reassuring and mitigate the risk of depression and anxiety associated with cancer diagnosis. ... Relative survival may help patients reorient their expectations by providing a comparison to a similar person without cancer, revealing that not every cancer diagnosis necessarily portends an earlier death.
I don't mean to suggest that anyone welcome a cancer diagnosis. Even cancers with a great relative prognosis cause emotional stress, more medical visits and expenses, potentially uncomfortable or risk-associated diagnostic procedures, and possibly chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or surgery. But it's critical for patients and clinicians to understand that some cancer (over)diagnoses are more the result of doctors looking too hard for them (see South Korea's "thyroid cancer epidemic" caused by an ill-advised national screening program) than one's genetics or behavior.
Despite this apparent progress, hardly anyone would call a cancer diagnosis "good news." But as my longtime readers know, all cancers are hardly created equal. Some are almost invariably lethal, some are "cancer" in name only, and most reside somewhere in between. A less heralded research letter in JAMA Internal Medicine in December presented relative and disease-specific survival statistics of 10 early-stage cancers in three illustrative graphs. (I wish that I could reproduce the figures here, but the American Medical Association takes copyright infringement quite seriously and requests prohibitive fees for reprinting its content, even if the data are derived from a public source such as the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance Epidemiology End Results (SEER) registry - which these are.)
Dr. Andrea Marcadis and colleagues found three patterns in the SEER data from 2004 to 2015. The first one you might expect: for early oral cavity/pharyngeal, bladder, and lung/bronchus cancers, relative survival (comparing survival of a cancer population to that of a matched population without cancer) was worse than disease-specific survival (the proportion of patients not dying of their cancer), likely related to a higher smoking prevalence in these patients. The second pattern, which held true for testicular and pancreatic cancer, showed relative survival that was similar to disease-specific survival, even though the prognosis of testicular cancer is generally excellent, while the prognosis of pancreatic cancer is usually terrible.
The third pattern was the most interesting: for early prostate, breast (including ductal carcinoma in situ, which was considered separately), thyroid cancer, and melanoma, relative survival was not only better than disease-specific survival, but greater than 100%. In other words, patients with these particular early cancer types were more likely to survive than similar individuals without cancer.
How can a cancer diagnosis possibly predict future good health? The answer emerges from what these cancers have in common that the others don't: we screen patients for them, even though the evidence of net screening benefit varies quite markedly. Patients who undergo regular screening are also more likely to follow their doctors' advice and practice other health-enhancing behaviors. The researchers noted:
These statistics can help physicians explain to certain patients that their actions prior to diagnosis may mean more for their survival than the diagnosis itself. This may be reassuring and mitigate the risk of depression and anxiety associated with cancer diagnosis. ... Relative survival may help patients reorient their expectations by providing a comparison to a similar person without cancer, revealing that not every cancer diagnosis necessarily portends an earlier death.
I don't mean to suggest that anyone welcome a cancer diagnosis. Even cancers with a great relative prognosis cause emotional stress, more medical visits and expenses, potentially uncomfortable or risk-associated diagnostic procedures, and possibly chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or surgery. But it's critical for patients and clinicians to understand that some cancer (over)diagnoses are more the result of doctors looking too hard for them (see South Korea's "thyroid cancer epidemic" caused by an ill-advised national screening program) than one's genetics or behavior.
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Becoming a better doctor
For the most part, I don't make New Year's resolutions. I've always thought that the beginning of a calendar year was an arbitrary time to decide to start or stop doing something, and despite being the start of a new decade, 2020 feels no different. However, for the past several months, I have been working on a few professional self-improvement projects that I hope will make me a better doctor in the long term.
Last fall, I completed a training course through the Providers Clinical Support System and obtained my DATA waiver in order to provide medication-assisted treatment with buprenorphine to patients with opioid use disorder (OUD). As I observed in a Medscape commentary last year, some patients with chronic pain will continue to need long-term opioid therapy, and a certain percentage of them will eventually progress to misuse and OUD. And that doesn't include many others who become dependent on illicit opioids. Buprenorphine is an effective and evidence-based treatment that allows many patients to attain remission of their disease and put their lives back together, and as illustrated in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, family physicians are increasingly equipping themselves to provide it, much as primary care took on the responsibility of caring for victims of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
As intravenous drug use has fueled the opioid overdose epidemic, it has also been driving up rates of chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections in young adults. Since September, I have been participating in a Project ECHO program through Medstar Health that is training primary care clinicians to manage or co-manage adults with HCV in Washington, DC and Maryland. Although I have expressed skepticism in the past about widespread one-time screening for HCV (and remain uncertain that the evidence supports the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's proposed expansion of screening to all persons age 18 to 79 years), I'm also very much aware that this disease isn't going away without treatment. As the prices of antiviral drugs come down and states come up with creative ways to finance bulk purchasing for Medicaid recipients, more family physicians should acquire the skills to treat these patients.
Finally, while serving on my medical school's Subcommittee on Faculty Diversity & Inclusion, I became interested in how implicit (unconscious) bias affects not only faculty recruitment, but student and employee recruitment, mentoring, and promotion; workplace culture; and contributes to health disparities through effects on patient care. I joined our inaugural Bias Reduction and Improvement Coaching (BRIC) train-the-trainer program in part to better understand how to mitigate negative consequences of unconscious biases on my own students and patients.
Last fall, I completed a training course through the Providers Clinical Support System and obtained my DATA waiver in order to provide medication-assisted treatment with buprenorphine to patients with opioid use disorder (OUD). As I observed in a Medscape commentary last year, some patients with chronic pain will continue to need long-term opioid therapy, and a certain percentage of them will eventually progress to misuse and OUD. And that doesn't include many others who become dependent on illicit opioids. Buprenorphine is an effective and evidence-based treatment that allows many patients to attain remission of their disease and put their lives back together, and as illustrated in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, family physicians are increasingly equipping themselves to provide it, much as primary care took on the responsibility of caring for victims of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
As intravenous drug use has fueled the opioid overdose epidemic, it has also been driving up rates of chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infections in young adults. Since September, I have been participating in a Project ECHO program through Medstar Health that is training primary care clinicians to manage or co-manage adults with HCV in Washington, DC and Maryland. Although I have expressed skepticism in the past about widespread one-time screening for HCV (and remain uncertain that the evidence supports the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force's proposed expansion of screening to all persons age 18 to 79 years), I'm also very much aware that this disease isn't going away without treatment. As the prices of antiviral drugs come down and states come up with creative ways to finance bulk purchasing for Medicaid recipients, more family physicians should acquire the skills to treat these patients.
Finally, while serving on my medical school's Subcommittee on Faculty Diversity & Inclusion, I became interested in how implicit (unconscious) bias affects not only faculty recruitment, but student and employee recruitment, mentoring, and promotion; workplace culture; and contributes to health disparities through effects on patient care. I joined our inaugural Bias Reduction and Improvement Coaching (BRIC) train-the-trainer program in part to better understand how to mitigate negative consequences of unconscious biases on my own students and patients.
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