J Am Board Fam Med
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Nearly all family physicians have patients that engender a sense of frustration or dislike, often described as "difficult." Most research in this area focuses on describing these patients and their physicians, not management or coping. ⋯ We propose a model where clashes between patient behaviors and physicians' traits turn a successful encounter of collaboration, appropriate use of power and empathy into a difficult encounter of opposition, misuse of power and compassion fatigue. Management strategies used by our participants aim to return success to the encounter and may serve as a guide for practicing physicians and for future research.
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Specialty, work effort, and gender have been shown to be associated with physicians' annual incomes. We hypothesized that provider race might also be associated with differences in family physicians' incomes. Therefore, we conducted a study that used survey data to explore the relationship between provider gender and race and family physicians' annual incomes. ⋯ During the 1990s, female gender was associated with lower annual incomes among family physicians, substantially so for black women. These findings warrant further exploration to determine what factors might cause the gender-based income differences that we found.