[Trends in the specialty of internal medicine: specialization and/or integration]

The successes of modern medicine are results of the specialisation in medicine due to the technical development. With increasing specialisation several problems for education and training, for research and medical care develop, so, for instance, a total investigation of patients is not always given on a sufficient scale. Therefore it should increasedly be orientated to an education and training to a generalist both in the training of students of the subject human medicine and during the time of specialisation in the field of internal medicine. At the same time it appears necessary to discuss more intensely the integration and/or the specialisation with the internal specialists working in practice and in research, in order to develop at first a corresponding sense for the problems and to integrate the professional status of the generalist increasedly into the self-appreciation of all specialists of internal medicine.