All general practitioners should consider continuing medical education (CME) courses whether they are required or not. Keeping yourself updated on different topics and changes in lines of thought can help you give the best possible treatment to your patients.
Specialties
Although general practitioners will refer their patients for specialized care, understanding different disease processes can help you identify problems when they are in the earlier stages. For example, autoimmune diseases frequently go undiagnosed for years, which can mean significant joint or organ damage and a harder time bringing the disease under control. If you are able to identify the symptoms of a suspected autoimmune disease and order the appropriate tests, you can refer patients to a specialist sooner. Other specialized issues, such as hypertension or diabetes, will be managed in the primary care setting, often for years before a specialist is needed. Learning more about these issues might change the medications you prescribe for chronic diseases.
Weight Management
The primary care setting is often responsible for addressing weight management issues and any referrals to nutritionists or bariatric professionals. Many doctors do not do enough to addresses their concerns with their patient and some only rely on outdated nutrition and exercise suggestions. You may want to take courses that discuss different dietary plans that may not align with established guidelines. For example, more people are adopting low-carbohydrate diets instead of a balanced diet. Although you may not be ready to recommend this way of eating, you can better have a discussion with patients who are interested and stay abreast of the available information as more research into these diets becomes available.
Medical Bias
One topic that can be sensitive, but is worth exploring, is issues of bias in the medical community. Different types of bias, whether they are explicit or implicit, can prevent patients from receiving the same level of care or may result in misdiagnoses. The best defense against any type of bias is education. Some topics you might want to pursue further are differences in diagnoses and prescribing among various patient populations. These courses may give you ideas on how to evaluate yourself for biases you may not realize, such as spending less time with certain patients or not prescribing similar treatments for patients when their symptoms are the same. Additionally, these courses are good to start a discussion in your practice about what everyone can do better.
Each year, you should spend time further educating yourself with physician CME courses, especially as a general practitioner. Since primary care is often the first medical professional patients see for a wide range of issues, it only makes sense to be well-versed in a variety of topics.
