The need for office dermatology in the UK revisited

My article in the BMJ continues to attract a few letters. Worth reading them. This link should get you behind the paywall. I have had a small number of emails from GPs direct. Some clearly believe they are the only people who do any work in the UK and, not surprisingly, they reserve their scorn for academics or NHS consultants who they believe either (i) live in ivory towers or (ii) do not do any work ‘at the coal face’. A central tenet of my argument is that primary care should not be equated with generalism, but rather we are going to need much higher standards of clinical practice for many domains of medicine outside hospital. This does not negate the need for generalists, but it does constrain it.