Applying for Interventional Spine.

[vitriol102]

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Hello

I’ve graduated residency and been out two years in private practice inpatient rehab. I have some questions:

1. I really want to do interventional spine. But I still like inpatient rehab. Is it possible to combine both? Does anyone have such a set up?

2. For interventional spine, being out from residency (small program with no connections), what would be the best way to go about connecting with fellowship programs?

3. Are there any organizations, lectures, meetings or workshops which would be good for networking?

 

[Jitter Bug]

I used to do both, but as a generalist carrying an inpatient service all you can do is "dabble" in interventional spine, becuase you need plenty of clinic time to find those folks who need injections. So each week, 50% of your time goes to other stuff: inpatient, EMG's, general rehab patient followups, 30% goes to spine patient clinic visits, and you may find 30% of those folks need injections. The last 20% of your time you block for your injections.

It's hard to maintain interventional competency with such a small procedure load. It can be done, but it's a challenge. You can also aggressively market yourself to get referrals for injections from your partners and other docs in your area which may bolster your procedure volumes, but then you have to deal with the issue of performing procedures ordered by other people, and sometime other people have stupid ideas about which injections should be done.

The other way to do interventional spine and inpatient rehab is to go academic medicine and work 100 hours a week. One of my mentors from residency did this, because he's one of those guys who doesn't need sleep and likes having a finger in every pie.