Subspecialty

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A subspecialty is narrow field within a specialty such as forensic pathology, which is a subspecialty of anatomical pathology.

In medicine subspecialization is particularly common in internal medicine and has grown as medicine has:

  1. become more complex and
  2. it has become clear that a physician's case volume is negatively associated with their complication rate; that is, complications tend decrease as volume of cases goes up.[1][2]

[edit] References

  1. ^ McHenry CR (2002). "Patient volumes and complications in thyroid surgery". The British journal of surgery 89 (7): 821–3. doi:10.1046/j.1365-2168.2002.02145.x. PMID 12081730.  Full Text
  2. ^ Birkmeyer JD, Finlayson EV, Birkmeyer CM (2001). "Volume standards for high-risk surgical procedures: potential benefits of the Leapfrog initiative". Surgery 130 (3): 415–22. doi:10.1067/msy.2001.117139. PMID 11562662.