I'm just a little confused on how everything in ur med career works out..
You go to college, med school, and then what? If one goes to Brown PLME and finish 8 years, what do they afterwards if they're interested in radiology?
I think I'm really confused about residency...?
P.S. Oh, since Brown's considered... not as hard (after getting in) as other schools, does it hurt your chances after you finish school?
To address this specific question...
The quick and easy answer is, to become a board certified physician in a certain specialty, you would need to complete a medical residency in that specialty and pass that specialty boards. For board certified radiologists: you must have completed a radiology residency (which is effectively 5 years) and passed your radiology board examinations (which consist of 3 tests). Different residency specialties may have different time requirements to be eligible to take your specialty boards and graduate.
Technically speaking, the only requirement to be able to legally practice
any kind of medicine in the United States is to obtain a state license. And as far as I know, to obtain a state license all you have to do is complete
at least one year of residency training. After that point, you can technically perform any kind of medicine you wish assuming the hospital allows you to. Practically speaking, almost no hospital will hire you and give you "privileges" to perform specialized medical procedures on their premises unless you are
board certified in that particular specialty.
To confuse you even more... there are exceptions to the rule. Emergency medicine is a good example. Even though emergency medicine is technically its own specialty with its own residency and specialty boards, MANY (if not most) emergency medicine physicians are
not board certified in emergency medicine. Usually they are either board certified in either family medicine or internal medicine, but some aren't board certified in anything at all. I know one EM doc that had only completed one year of general surgery residency before getting hired as an emergency medicine physician at a small community hospital.
In many rural area hospitals, even family medicine physicians are given privileges to perform certain general surgery procedures (particularly cholecystectomies, appendectomies and hernia repair). I have even heard of a family medicine doctor that had to perform a craniotomy (I believe it was because of an epidural hematoma). The hospital permitted him to go ahead with the operation so it was perfectly legal (the patient survived, btw).
