Medical Residencies: Quantity or Quality?

Excerpt

Every March 15 since 1985 the internal medicine community has read the residency match results in much the same way priests read entrails millenia ago: to interpret the past and to prognosticate. Internists make a career of reading entrails, and in the case of the match they read trouble.

Indeed, the 1989 match just reported (1) shows the downward trend in selection of categorical internal medicine residencies by U.S. medical students continuing: 259 fewer students this year than last; 827 or 21% fewer students this year than in 1985, the "peak" year for the discipline. Family practice also experienced a