Rural medicine and scope of practice in Japan. Rural areas often have less access to medical specialists, and so, it is thought that rural practitioners need to have a wide scope of practice to fill that void, but this correlation had not been tested in Japan. ‘Scope of practice’ is the range of care offered by a particular physician, and wide scope is a core domain of family medicine. So, in a recent study, researchers asked a cross section of the primary care practitioners in Japan to fill out two questionnaires measuring scope of practice. Both measures of scope correlated tightly with a rurality index, with a broad scope of practice being found in rural practices. Wide scope of practice has been associated with reduced physician burnout rates in other studies. So, while the design of this study does not reveal causality between rurality and scope of practice, the results increase our understanding of how scope of practice varies in different areas of Japan.