A Doctor's Journal
Talking Point
By MILES HOWARD
I HEAR that the conference on training of the family doctor by the discussion-group method, held at the Tavistock Clinic last weekend, went well. The birth and flowering of this idea—of a seminar every week : perhaps eight to ten doctors la practice and a colleague with special skill and experience in the analytical sphere—has been the most remarkable single advance in the field of `family doctoring' since the war. It has become. a truism now, indeed almost a cliché, to say that the era of organic medicine has reached and passed its zenith—the doctor of tomorrow will, of necessity, have another outlook : no one with any awareness of the social and medical scene of today is likely to deny this, but remarkably little is being done about it.
The notion of seminars for doctors—of ad kinds—has caught on. At the Tavistock Clinic there are, I believe, quite a number of them en- gaged in active work—and even (it is said) one for consultants: traditionally the most conser- vative of all. In Europe, the Dutch have been the first to perceive the value of discussion-group methods—a friend from Holland told me the other day that fresh groups, or nuclei, are form-
ing themselves at a surprisingly rapid rate. Not . at all surprising, I retorted: signs of growing awareness, and of pressure for post-graduate lraining in the social and personal origins of IllneSs, as distinct from the physical, are to he seen on all sides. The dOctor who takes his Work seriously, and has any sense of vocation, comes sooner or later to the realisation that although his medical degrees qualify him to diagnose and treat maladies in his patients due the main to injury, infection and malforma- ion, disorders in this class are now moving teadily down the incidence list. His patients bring to him a multitude of disorders, many of them compound or complex, with which he isn't equipped to deal: he feels frustrated : he'd like to do more, but how?
The Guardian published in October a quite lengthy list of courses open to the family doctor, including a series of seminars held at the Univer- sity of London's Post4raduate Federation Head- quarters in Guilford Street—this is, I under- stand, a pilot run : but the attendance-rate. and the level of interest, point to keenness in quest for knowledge in the group, and we can have great hopes for it.
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