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Home > Residents and Medical Students > Why Vascular Surgery?

Why Vascular Surgery?

A Career of Innovation

As far as medicine goes, vascular surgery offers the most versatility and stimulation to you as a medical professional. Not only will you master the intricacies of vascular surgery, you will be learning state-of-the-art endovascular techniques as well. What’s more, build long-term relationships your patients and their families, and serve as the primary physician for all their vascular needs: medical and diagnostic, endovascular and traditional surgery.

Intricate and demanding, vascular surgery is not “one-size-fits-all” surgery – each patient presents an individual vascular problem requiring a unique solution.

As a vascular surgeon, you will be trained to respond with various modalities:

• open surgical procedures
• endovascular procedures
• even medical therapies

Minimally invasive, percutaneous procedures are advancing rapidly and have revolutionized the ease at which outcomes are obtained for patients as well as offering the opportunity to continuously hone your skills as a vascular surgeon. The interventions may be limb or life saving, and as a vascular surgeon, you are charged with treating the complete patient.

As one vascular surgeon notes, “There is no medical counterpart to vascular surgeons.”

Now more than ever, your choice to become a vascular surgeon will fulfill an acutely growing need created by the aging population in the United States and beyond. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 30 years between 2000 and 2030 will witness a near doubling of individuals aged 65 years and older, from approximately 35 million to an estimated 71 million; the number of persons age 80 years and more will more than double in the same time period – from 9.3 to 19.5 million.¹

Your talents, your dedication, your skills as a vascular surgeon will be critical in meeting this urgent need.

^{1. No authors listed. Public health and aging : trends in aging -- United States and worldwide. MMWR 2003;52:101-6.}