Hate to break it to you, but as "averages", these numbers are bogus. Medscape, a more reputable source than this commercial entity, published a salary study this past year and indicated that the fields with the highest averages (for folks in practice, not "starting salaries") are ortho and dagnostic radiology, each with an average salary of $350k, and the field with the lowest average salary is peds, with an average salary of about $148k. Everything else was somewhere in between. Sources that tell you otherwise are simply not reflecting averages, and theres a lot of puffery going on. Commercial entities that want you to use their services are notorious for inflation, so basically are recruiting firms play bait and switch with the numbers. In particular the spine data published in your list reflects what people earned before recent adjustments to reimbursements which now disallow level by level billing (surgery on 10 vertebrae used to be ten separate billing items, now it's just one).