Number of cardiac surgery jobs falling

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.