Neurophysiology fellowship

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Molly Maquire

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HI,

Is it necessary to do a fellowship in neurophysiology to do EEG/EMG, or can any general neurologist perform and bill for these tests? Does the fellowship enable you to perform more complex tests that bill for a higher rate?

thanks.
 
Molly Maquire said:
HI,

Is it necessary to do a fellowship in neurophysiology to do EEG/EMG, or can any general neurologist perform and bill for these tests? Does the fellowship enable you to perform more complex tests that bill for a higher rate?

thanks.

You don't need to be fellowship trained to do the procedures. HOWEVER, you do need to do a lot of them fairly often to get good and maintain your skills, especially with EMG, which can be incredibly operator dependent. A fellowship will give you this opportunity (after doing nothing but EMG for whole year, you're going to be pretty familiar with it). A fellowship will also let you become more familiar with less common techniques (autonomic testing, quantitative EMG, etc) that may come in handy some day when you are confronted with something beyond the usual carpal tunnel or radiculopathy. Most neurology residents get about 4 months of EMG/EEG during residency, which is enough to get the basics, but by no means makes you an expert. Of course, there are probably plenty of decent EMG/EEG people out there who are more or less self-taught and who over the years "learned by doing." You just have to make sure you're doing it right.

Nowadays, however, everyone seems to want "fellowship trained" whatever subspecialists (stroke, movement disorder, EMG, etc), so it's unfortunately almost become a necessity to do a fellowship, and we may soon see a day when you CAN'T do an EMG without a fellowship and board certification.
 
Is there a listing of neurophysiology fellowships somewhere online?
 
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