Family practice in the United States: a status report.

Since family practice was first recognized as a specialty in the late 1960s, considerable intellectual and organizational change has occurred in medicine, especially during the 1990s. To reflect on and reconsider the role of family practice in US health care, this article reviews the development of family practice as a specialty, provides a current assessment of the status of family medicine in the United States, and comments on issues that are of ongoing importance to family practice.