Johanna Shapiro, PhD
That family practice has facets which are both unique and distinct from other primary care specialties is an assertion which has been widely debated. The contention of this article is that, in fact, family practice deserves to be understood as a distinct specialty. We shall argue that the uniqueness of family practice is found not so much in the content of the specialty (ie, competency-based mastery of specific procedures, broad range of patient population) as in the process of the specialty (ie, how the specialty is actually practiced): how family doctors think about, interact with, and make decisions about their patients.