Gary native Janet Seabrook returned to her home town to practice medicine, making her one of a dwindling number of doctors willing to practice in areas in which they're most needed.

Executive director of the Gary Community Health Center, Seabrook treats inner-city patients who might otherwise put off doctor visits until a crisis sends them to the emergency room, she said.

Nationwide, fewer than one-fourth of medical school students said they planned to practice medicine in an underserved area, typically less affluent urban or rural parts of the country, the 2003 survey of 20,000 students sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges states.

Financial considerations play a part in a profession in which earnings can more than double for work in affluent populations.

"When students come in, they're very idealistic. They've been volunteering, and then real life takes over," researcher LuAnn Wilkerson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for a story earlier this month.

Wilkerson, senior associate dean for medical education at UCLA, was an author of an analysis of the survey published in the Sept. 10 Journal of the American Medical Association.

Parts of Gary, Hammond, East Chicago and Lake Station qualify as medically underserved areas in which residents have a shortage of health care professionals, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Federal guidelines call for one primary care physician for every 2,000 people.

Seabrook had been a primary care physician at a community health center in Chicago before helping to found the Gary Community Health Center 12 years ago.

Outpatients were traveling from Gary to the Chicago clinic for doctor care, Seabrook said.

"That was what actually made me aware that a community health center was needed," she said.

The clinic, which logs about 13,000 visits a year, employs two family physicians, a dentist, an obstetrician, a pediatrician, a nurse/midwife and two nurse practitioners. But the facility could use another two family doctors, Seabrook said.

Finding them could be difficult.

In a second study reported this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, only 2 percent of 1,200 graduating medical students surveyed said they planned to work in primary care internal medicine -- the doctors who once were the backbone of the medical system. In a similar survey in 1990, the figure was 9 percent.

Paperwork, the demands of the chronically sick and the need to bring work home were among factors pushing young doctors away from careers in primary care, the survey found.

Salary may be another reason.

Family medicine, at $186,000, had the lowest average salary last year. Orthopedic surgery paid $436,000.

Seabrook said she was drawn to the work after serving a clinical rotation with a family doctor while a student at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn.

"I just remember the rapport she had with her patients," Seabrook said. "It really allowed her to manage her patients' health. Little things like that meant a lot."

The Associated Press contributed to this story.