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What's the deal with Nuclear Medicine? Are there alot of jobs out there for docs trained in nuclear med. but not radiology? And most importantly what exactly do they do?
Nuclear Medicine
- Thread starter Soma13
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There's a pretty healthy demand for nuclear med docs right now. Besides interpreting certain types of cardiac stress tests, they also deal with dispensing radioactive chemotherapeutic agents such as radioactive iodine for thyroid cancers, they do bone scans and wbc scans, and they do other things that I don't know about too. I think that the field will become much more popular in the near future as more and more grads recognize this field as one of those easy lifestyle/well compensated new emerging fields. Like radiology, their scope of practice will probably keep growing as we find more and more radioactive objects to inject into patients.
CKENT, you do not know what you are talking about.
There are VERY few jobs for docs with only nucs training. If you have rads training and a nucs fellowship then you can write your own ticket.
I dont know what the future of the field is, but fact is that you are practically worthless to a radiology private practice group with only nucs training. You cant take call, you cant rotate through the various subspecialties, and in almost all cases you will not have enough work to keep you busy 100%. Remember that most nuclear medicine docs work in radiology and private practice probably represents 99% of practice opportunities.
Academics is a different story, but there are still relatively few jobs.
There are VERY few jobs for docs with only nucs training. If you have rads training and a nucs fellowship then you can write your own ticket.
I dont know what the future of the field is, but fact is that you are practically worthless to a radiology private practice group with only nucs training. You cant take call, you cant rotate through the various subspecialties, and in almost all cases you will not have enough work to keep you busy 100%. Remember that most nuclear medicine docs work in radiology and private practice probably represents 99% of practice opportunities.
Academics is a different story, but there are still relatively few jobs.
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Well, I'm certainly no nuclear medicine expert, but I didn't pull my comments out of thin air. I was basing my comments on what some nuc medicine attendings had told my class. One attending was telling us how he played solitare all day and was paid a lot of money. Anyways, always good to hear from different sources I guess.
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How about a doc that is dual boarded in IM and Nuclear Med? Would it be possible to join an IM practice or multi-speciality practice and do mostly nuc med and IM call.
PS- thanks for the replys
PS- thanks for the replys
Right now there isn't much demand for a nuclear medicine trained doc who isn't radiology trained and I think it will get even bleaker in the future. While nuclear medicine is a very important field, the hot area of nuclear medicine right now is PET. With the newer fusion scanners out, you need to be able to be good at cross sectional imaging to read PET well. There is a thread over at auntminnie discussing the future of nuclear medicine by radiologists and nuclear medicine docs and they pretty much agree that having the radiology training is essential. There are still jobs, but only at the larger hospitals or academic centers.
