[Providing educational goals in social medicine for the practicing physician in basic medical education].

Social Medicine has a long and successful tradition in providing public medical care, but it does not have a long-standing academic tradition. To this very date, some medical faculties have neither a representative of the discipline nor a corresponding institute. Although the topics of Social Medicine are manifold, there is a discrepancy in the time allotted for teaching within the medical curriculum. Social Medicine must offer practical and orientational knowledge. In the medical faculties, Social Medicine also represents the health sciences, and in the Schools of Public Health it has the function of a bridge discipline and is the most prominent representative of medicine.