Why Are Today's Medical Students Choosing High-Technology Specialties over Internal Medicine?

To the Editor: In his Sounding Board article (Aug. 27 issue),¹ McCarty laments the brain drain from internal medicine to other specialties that Matching Day (“Black Tuesday”) seems to announce. If one looks only at the unmatched positions for internal medicine, the apocalypse does indeed seem close at hand (Table 1). However, the unmatched positions do not illustrate a dismaying retreat from medicine at all. Rather, they describe disjunctions caused by an increase in the number of positions offered, set against a decline in the number of eligible candidates. In 1987, the number of positions offered in internal medicine increased,.