While not given enough credit at times, general practitioners are one of the vital components of the healthcare domain. These professionals typically treat both acute and chronic illnesses, as well as offers preventive care and health education to patients. As mentioned by Vijaya Boggala, these professionals basically are trained to offer a host of non-surgical health care to adult patients, mostly adults. They might even be required to care for difficult, serious or unusual medical problems, and continue to see the patients till these issues have been orderly resolved or stabilized. Dr. Vijaya himself is a male general practitioner based in Durham, North Carolina. He is licensed to practice by the state board in North Carolina.
Vijaya Boggala discusses the duties of general practitioners
General practitioners typically manage various illnesses in an undifferentiated manner at an early stage of development. Vijaya Boggala underlines that this holistic approach of general practice is largely focused on taking into consideration the various social, psychological and biological factors that are relevant to the care of the ailment suffered by each of the patients. Dr. Vijaya is a general practitioner and an internist. Being a part of the medical field, he has a good level of knowledge about the duties and practice areas of general practitioners. He mentions that these physicians typically care for people regardless of gender, age, or condition, and tend to provide preventative care through immunizations, as well as routine health care through physical examinations.
- Comprehensive approach: The assessment of general practitioners is generally comprehensive in nature, no matter the particular issue faced by their patients. Having this comprehensive approach aids the physicians to detect problems and consider new diagnostic possibilities that might have been otherwise missed.
- Complex Care: General physicians can often be effective in caring for patients who are dealing with complex illnesses for which diagnosis might be difficult. The knowledge and experience of these medical professionals enables them to expertly diagnose and treat problems that affect various parts of the body of the patients. These physicians may even have the capacity to help the patients to deal with the social and psychological impact of a disease.
- Procedures: General practitioners are typically able to carry out a host of medical procedures meant for diagnosing and treating patients having distinguished severe and complex illnesses.
- Diagnosis: Most experienced general practitioners would have the knowledge of the usefulness, limitations and costs of various diagnostic tests. Hence, they generally use these tests in a logical, safe and effective manner to investigate difficult diagnostic issues.
In addition to carrying out the tasks mentioned above, general practitioners also help treat diverse ailments in patients. They have the knowledge of diverse complex interactions of medications given simultaneously to treat several illnesses in a patient. In certain cases, family doctors are mistaken to be general practitioners. While both of their domains are overlapping, it is important to know that family doctors and general practitioners are not the same.
