Direct Primary Care, in my humble opinion, is the last and only hope for primary care in general. With this in mind, I want to share this article called How doctors across the country—fed up, burned-out, and disillusioned—are trying to reclaim the soul of medicine. It was written by Emily Silverman who is an internal-medicine physician at UCSF, writer, and creator of The Nocturnists. The article is LONG but hits every aspect of DPC. If you ever want to know about DPC or how to start a Direct Primary Care clinic then read this article!

My favorite quotes from the article:

Vance Lassey, MD:  “It’s the only conference where the attendees are smiling, not milling around like zombies in the land of the dead,” he’d written in an email. “Maybe you’ll find ‘your people’ there. I know I did.”

Kennethy Qiu: “It just doesn’t make sense anymore for a two-cent lisinopril to go through insurance,” says Kenneth Qiu, a DPC doctor in Virginia who started his practice right out of residency. “The things that don’t need to be insured, we’ve literally pulled out of insurance.”

Jeffrey Gold, MD: Most patients have some core fear they want to express, Gold explained, and part of our role as doctors is to locate and validate those fears. “Only now, I can tell them, ‘You don’t have to pretend you have back pain,’” he said. “Let’s have a cup of coffee, shoot the breeze. I don’t have to worry about what I’m going to code for. And it’s kind of fun to hear stories about the war and other stuff that happened before we were born.” 

And here is from the author at the end:

Then I remembered the persistence of the DPC doctors. The sense of purpose and community in the hotel ballroom. Something was driving these people up the mountain—the new entrepreneur, doing a pap smear on the floor of an unfurnished exam room; the family doctor, pedaling her Velomobile to work at the crack of dawn with her strobe light on; the mournful introvert, listening to war stories over a cup of coffee, and then heading home to toss and turn in bed. For all of them, the DPC movement is both radical and vulnerable. Being among its people, even for just a short time, had felt a bit like holding a hummingbird—the soul of medicine, delicate and thrumming and inviolable. As one doctor put it, “You could pay me ten million dollars and I’d give it away and keep living in my camper and being a doctor. That’s how much I love medicine.”