General medicine or internal medical practice (in Commonwealth nations) is the medical field that deals to the preventative, diagnostic and treatment of adult illnesses. Internal medicine specialists are referred to as internists or doctors. Internists are proficient in managing patients suffering from multi-system or undifferentiated disease processes.
Role of Internal Medicine Physicians:
Internal medicine experts, often called general internal medicine specialists or general doctors within Commonwealth states, doctors trained to treat complex or multi-system illness conditions that single-organ disease specialists might not be prepared to handle. They are often asked to address undifferentiated complaints which aren’t easily fit into the scope of expertise of a single organ specialty for example, dyspnoea fatigue and chest pain, weight loss and confusion, or changes in the state of consciousness. They could manage serious acute illnesses that impact multiple organ systems simultaneously for a single patient and they could also treat multiple chronic diseases as well as “comorbidities” that a single patient might be suffering from.
The general internists don’t have the same expertise as single-organ specialists. Rather, they are trained for the specific job of taking care of patients who have multiple concurrent complications or with complex complications.
It could be because it is complicated to explain the treatment of ailments that aren’t localized to one organ There has been some confusion over the meaning of internal medicine as well as the role that the term “internist.” Internists are doctors who have completed postgraduate education in internal medicine. They are not to be confused with “interns”, who are doctors who are in their first year of residency. Internists are primary health care providers however, they are not “family physicians,” “family practitioners,” or “general practitioners,” whose training isn’t solely focused on adults, and can include surgery, obstetrics and pediatrics. According to the American College of Physicians defines internists as “physicians who specialize in the prevention, detection and treatment of illnesses in adults”.
Internal medicine physicians have worked in both clinics as well as hospitals, sometimes on one day. Time pressures have forced some internal medicine doctors choosing one location for practice which may mean they exclusively work in hospitals as”hospitalists” “hospitalist”, or only at an outpatient clinic as the primary medical doctor.
The following are the sub-specialties that are which are covered under Internal Medicine:
- Adolescent medication
- Allergic reactions, Asthma as well as Immunology, is concerned with diagnostic, treatment, and treatment of allergic reactions, asthma and other disorders of immune systems.
- Cardiology is the treatment of disorders of the blood vessels and heart.
- Clinical electro-physiology of the heart
- Critical care medicine
- Endocrinology deals with the disorders of the endocrine gland and its hormone-specific secretions, known as hormones
- Gastroenterology, which is the digestive disorders
- Geriatric medicine
- Hematology is the study of blood, the organs that form blood and the disorders that accompany it.
- Hospital medicine
- Infectious disease, involving diseases that is caused by an biological cause such as a virus or bacterium, or parasite
- Interventional cardiology
- Medical Oncology, which focuses on the chemical (chemical) or the immunotherapeutic (immunological) treatments for cancer
- Nephrology, which is the study of the function and disease of the kidney.
- Pulmonology, which deals with the diseases of the lungs as well as the respiratory tract
- Rheumatology is a field that focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of rheumatic disorders.
- Sleep medicine
- Sports medicine
- Hepatology Transplant