The research domain of family medicine

This article characterizes the large research domain of family medicine. It is a domain that can be productively explored from different perspectives, including: (1) the ecology of medical care and its focus on the environments of health care and interactions among them; (2) the realm of causation and important opportunities to discover how people lose and regain their health; (3) knowing medicine in different ways, focusing on what things mean in the inner and outer realities of individuals and groups of individuals; (4) the nature of the work of family physicians, such as first-contact care for any type of problem, sticking with patients regardless of their diagnoses, incorporating context into decision making, development of relevant technologies, articulating useful theory, and measuring what happens in family medicine; (5) the standard research categories of basic, clinical, health services, health policy, and educational research; and (6) thinking of family medicine research as both a linear process of translation and a wheel of knowledge with iterative loops of discovery that come from within family medicine. The domain of family medicine research is important and ripe for fuller discovery, and it invites the thinking and imagination of the best investigators. It seems unlikely that medical research can ever be complete without a robust family medicine research enterprise. As the domain of family medicine research is explored, not a few, but billions of people will benefit.