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Number of cardiac surgery jobs falling

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As the use of stents has grown and the number of cardiac bypass procedures has fallen in turn, jobs for cardiac surgeons have taken a hit. These days, cardiac surgeons who keep up active practices are often picking up a lot more heart valve or lung surgeries rather than focusing on bypass procedures. The dip in job opportunity is so pronounced that the specialty is falling out of favor in medical school. According to an article published in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery last year, 12 percent of the 88 cardiothoracic residents surveyed received no job offers in 2004. Meanwhile, the number of students who do move ahead with the training has fallen enough that some programs can't fill all of their openings. Students are apparently wary of spending 10 years training and ending up without the $419,980 average salary needed to pay for the training.

To learn more about the reduction in cardiac surgery jobs:
- read this USA Today piece

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The reduction in jobs for certain physician specialties is not a surprise to anyone with even a slight notion of how supply and demand works. As people watch their diet and weight, control their blood pressure, blood sugar and blood lipid levels and exercise more, stop smoking and drink only moderately, heart health is on the rise. Further, angioplasty techniques reduce the number of open heart procedures necessary, and finally, if stem cell research fulfills its ultimate destiny, we should see open heart procedures become a very rare occurrence in modern medicine. But, shouldn't this be our ultimate goal--reducing the most invasive, the most dangerous, and the most expensive procedures as the newer clinical approaches prove more successful in producing positive patient outcomes and satisfaction. The challenge will be for medical education systems to predict trends in specialty demand and allocate physician training programs accordingly. There may always be a need for surgeons, but not in the numbers we have needed them in the past.

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