Dr. David Weber, of Memphis, Tenn., is among a small but slowly growing number of physicians making calls to patients’ homes and offices.

Weber says he knows of no other physician in his area who does house calls. He began his journey on the road to house-call practice in January 2003 with the injury of a friend’s elderly mother.

Peggy Metz, a resident of a Memphis retirement community, fell and cut her scalp, and it bled profusely. Metz’s attendant called the 83-year-old woman’s daughter, Margaret — a friend and neighbor of Weber’s — about 9 p.m. for advice about what to do.

“My husband was the one who said, ‘Let’s just call David and see if he can’t take care of it,'” Margaret Metz said. “It was a godsend. Forty-five minutes later she was treated and tucked in bed. We’d have still been going through the paperwork if we’d had to go to the emergency room.”

After treating other neighbors for minor emergencies, Weber started his own business that June.

Weber found online the American Academy of Home Care Physicians. Statistics are difficult to find, said Constance Row, AAHCP executive director, but she believes the number of house-call physicians is growing steadily.

“It’s not one of these things where there’s suddenly rapid growth,” Row said. “Certainly it’s not taught in medical schools.”

But the United States is alone among Western industrialized nations for physicians who so rarely make house calls.

Besides researching aahcp.org, Joe Ventimiglia, a friend of Weber’s with whom he did residency in Memphis, expressed how much he loved his house-call practice in the Dallas area.

“It’s a badly needed service to the community,” Ventimiglia said.

Weber’s wife, Susan Weber, 29, is office manager in the passenger seat of their 2003 Honda, making appointments and keeping track of charges.

“We’re starting off slow, working out the kinks,” David Weber said.

Weber’s overhead is about one-fourth that of an office-based practice. That is good because he can see only six to eight patients a day.

“I feel the patient gets better care,” he said. “It’s obviously a lot less stress to comprehensively take care of eight people versus 50 people.”