A field that could use some doctor shopping: can addiction be a viable medical subspecialty?
That’s the general consensus among leaders in the addiction psychiatry arena to explain an unfortunate lack of new recruits into the addiction subspecialty. Witness these comments: * “It is what it is. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” laments Joseph Westermeyer, M.D., co-chair of the Addiction Certification and Recertification committee for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN). * “There are training slots that go unfilled every year,” says John Renner, director of the Addiction Psychiatry Residency Program at Boston University Medical Center. “I would say that we do well nationally if we fill 60 percent of the slots a year, and sometimes less than that.
