A tale of two medicines: why India should replace ‘general medicine’ with ‘internal medicine’

Walk into any major teaching hospital in India and look at the signboards. You are likely to find Cardiology, Neurology, Nephrology, Gastroenterology, Endocrinology departments—and, somewhere among them, a General Medicine. Now travel outside India and ask for the corresponding specialty. In most countries and in much of international medical literature, you will be directed to Internal Medicine. Are these two different specialties? No.

The Indian ‘general medicine’ physician and the international ‘internal medicine’ physician belong, essentially, to the same broad specialty: the discipline concerned principally with the diagnosis and non-surgical management of disease in adults. The question, therefore, is not whether Indian general medicine is different from internal medicine; it is whether India should continue using a name that has become increasingly ambiguous when a more precise and internationally intelligible name is available.