Primary care research: revisiting its definition and rationale.

Too often the questions of basic biomedical research have been mistaken to represent the critical scope of all medical research, and traditional laboratory methods have been seen as necessary and sufficient methods for understanding human health and illness. As a result, approximately 90% of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding is spent on research within the traditional biomedical sciences (anatomy, biochemistry, genetics, microbiology, molecular biology, physiology, and so forth). The smaller amount of federal funding available for clinical research has been spent primarily on specific disease entities, such as cancer and heart disease. These funding decisions have resulted in the neglect of a large proportion of the problems and issues that confront primary care physicians and their patients.