Throughout our study of family physician incomes, we have seen a lot of internal consistency. Both our internal retrospective study and the more recent survey of active members indicated that the biggest influence on income was the number of patient visits. Internal Medicine Physician Career Profile. I reassessed how many shifts I was actually comfortable working, how close to each other I scheduled them, and how much I traveled. Well, what you might not have realized is that generally speaking, these specialties must work a lot, pretty much every day, with one or two weekends off a month at most.