Time Spent by Internists on Adult Health Education and Preventive Medicine

Preventive and education are phrases that are on the tip of everyone's tongue nowadays. Because most of the publicity has been directed to mass methods of prevention and health education, however, little consideration has been given to the amount of time spent by the practitioner of medicine on preventive and health educational procedures in relation to the individual patient; practically no information on this subject is available in the literature. A recent survey by the American Academy of Pediatrics 1 showed that 54% of pediatricians' visits on an average day were for health supervision, and only 43% for the care of sick children, whereas 30% of the services rendered to children by general practitioners were for the supervision of health of well children. Since, as far as we know, no comparable figures are available for adult patients, we decided to make a preliminary survey among internists and general