Obstetricians and Gynecologists manage to solve problems of
health of the woman in state of pregnancy, puerperium and
lactation as well as the physiological and clinical pathological
states proper to its sex. They treat the diseases related to the
genital apparatus of the woman benign or malignant and the
alterations that compromise its functional state. They also
provide care to women with ethics and a critical spirit that
allows them to rationalize diagnostic methods for the study
of their problems. The gynocologist proposes adequate guidelines
for the therapeutic management of the problem at the
collective or individual level.
On the other hand, family doctors are the first point of entry
for health-care delivery, with links to higher levels of the
health system and other services. Family physicians do not
treat diseases but take care of people. Family medicine is the
medical specialty which provides continuing, comprehensive
health care for the individual and family within the context of
community. Providing family-oriented primary care is one of
the distinguishing features of this specialty.
Gynecologists and family doctors are the two medical specialties
that fundamentally share medical care for health problems
and preventive actions in women. In this field, both have to
work as a team. And they share the difficulties of managing
women’s health problems. Both also have to face a major
risk: overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Although this phenomenon
occurs in all medical specialties, women take better care
of their health, and they rely more on prevention than men, so
it is not surprising that they are more affected by the excess of
all types of health activities; the “excess medicine”.The clinical work is involved in the uncertainty because the application
of the Truths of biomedical science in the life and in
the circumstances of each individual patient will always be uncertain.
So doctors, especially young doctors, are learning to fear to the uncertainty. We are asking for more and more evidence.
To try to assure ourselves, often in vain, of what we are
seeing. And because we are afraid that those who are in the
kingdom of the healthy, perhaps should be in the realm of the
sick, continually divert resources from the sick to the healthy,
and so the overdiagnosis is inevitably linked to the insufficient
treatment of those who are already sick. Overdiagnosis of the
healthy and insufficient treatment of the sick are two sides of
the coin of modern medicine.
In this context, it can be logical that the concepts and theories
that belonging to Interface between gynecology and family
medicine are often difficult to explain and to understand.
To show this interface, with an educational approach, we can
do it through metaphors. Metaphors enable us to understand
something that is unknown in terms of its familiarity. For this
reason, they are used frequently in all sciences that adopt
common words to name complex realities. The metaphors are
analogue devices, used to illuminate reality. Metaphors can
simplify expert knowledge, not by ignoring or reducing the
inherent complexity, but by providing a point of entry for its
comprehension. They are a means of generating ideas, promoting
creativity, and constructing concepts and theories.
Thinking based on metaphors and comparisons is a way of
transforming a concept into something that is so suggestive,
interesting, and surprising, that it reaches people more easily.
