Internal Medicine physicians can pursue a fellowship after residency training. As a result, this has drawn many applicants each year to go into IM. The additional skillset from a fellowship can help you specialize and increase your desirability in the current job market. Unfortunately, some fellowships don’t have a big enough job market in a particular setting. Most specialists do well after training, but some don’t. But you can always fall back on Internal Medicine if your specialties do not work out as a career. 

There are many different fellowships to choose from, including cardiology, pulmonology, gastroenterology, infectious disease, rheumatology, sleep medicine, and more. They are all sub-branches of Internal Medicine. Cardiology has stood out for me since the beginning of medical school. In this article, I will try to convince you to become a cardiologist. Cardiology is the study of diseases of the heart and its vasculature. It is one of the most competitive specialties, and it has so much to offer from the medicine standpoint. To become a cardiologist, you will have to complete a Bachelor’s degree, four years of medical school, three years of internal medicine residency, and at least three years of fellowship training. Here are some of the reasons you should pursue cardiology as a career.

1. It has a variety of practices you can choose from.

The field of cardiology offers a variety of practice styles- ranging from outpatient practice, inpatient hospitalist, cardiac critical care, imaging, and transplant. In addition, you can further subspecialize into fields such as interventional cardiology, electrophysiology, advanced heart failure, cardiac imaging, etc. You can practice medicine in private clinics, hospitals, and an academic center. There are specialties like cardiac imaging that require reading films. But you can also work in an academic center and perform life-saving procedures like the cardiac angiogram. However, it is not like that for other specialties such as rheumatology, infectious disease, and allergy/immunology. This is why cardiology is attractive to most people. It gives you a lot of instant gratification. Most commonly, cardiologists work in the acute care setting in their early career and then transition into a slower pace practice such as the outpatient clinic. With the emergence of new technology, cardiology is becoming more exciting as we are going less invasive.

2. It has a lot of hands-on experiences.

Cardiology offers a lot of procedural training. Unlike a surgeon, we seldom place patients under general anesthesia and perform these procedures in the operating room. These include coronary angiogram and stent placement, such as in the case of heart attacks. You can also put in pacemakers and defibrillators to prevent and treat sudden cardiac death. You may even want to perform cardiac biopsies in transplant patients for routine monitoring. In addition to the procedures you learn in the training of Internal Medicine, cardiologists perform a lot of life-saving procedures. Additional training for structural heart diseases offers advanced procedures such as performing valvular replacement (TAVR) and repair (Mitra-clip) in the cath lab without performing opening heart surgery. If you are into procedures but not spending all of your time in the operating room, cardiology offers many opportunities. Furthermore, these procedures are now more favored compared to open-heart surgery. As our technology improves, the need for invasive surgery is lessened. This is one of the reasons I did not pursue cardiothoracic surgery. Most people receive stents these days as compared to bypass surgeries. I also did not enjoy the hectic lifestyle of a surgeon and the constant standing on your feet. 

3. The pathophysiology makes sense.

The study of cardiovascular diseases is one of the oldest professions. If you are interested in engineering principles, fluid dynamics, and the biomechanics of the human body, cardiology is the field for you. We learn about pressure-volume relationships, the plumbing system, and the heart’s electrical system. We put catheters that measure different parameters in the vasculature and apply mathematical models to treat diseases. We also modify our electrical system with catheters to treat life-threatening arrhythmias, such as ventricular tachycardia. On the contrary, if you are not into invasive procedures, the field also offers sonography, CAT scan, and MRI training to evaluate for heart diseases. You can learn how to perform an ultrasound on the heart and look for abnormalities. You manage congestive heart failure, one of the most common causes of death in the United States. Most importantly, you are not abandoning your ability to diagnose and treat conditions from Internal Medicine. 

4. The job market is secure, and we will always need cardiologists.

Cardiovascular diseases remain the top cause of death in the world. Type 2 diabetes and morbid obesity are also prevalent in first-world countries, affecting one in four people. These diseases guarantee the job market for physicians interested in heart diseases. The job market for cardiologists is excellent as compared to other specialized fields. The average cardiologist has a starting median salary of 350,000 USD, and the top 5 percentile of cardiologists make over one million dollars annually. There is no shortage of jobs in most metropolitan cities, and most cardiologists can work in both academic and community settings. Unless you pursue a highly specialized field in cardiology, you can most likely practice anywhere you want. And you do not have to rely on hospitals and costly technology to perform your job. Overall, cardiology offers a well-rounded medical career for most physicians. It will satisfy whatever you are looking for. I highly recommend cardiology as a career path if you enjoy procedures, medicine, and developing lifelong relationships with your patients.

Last but not least, thank you so much for reading my blog. I hope you consider cardiology as your medical career and that you have learned a few things from this post. Please comment, like, and subscribe if you like content like this.