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About this page

This medical specialties list covers every kind of doctor and clinician in our directory, from family medicine and cardiology to nurse practitioners and physical therapists. You can filter the table by name or type, and sort it by any column.

What each page in the medical specialties list shows

  • How many practice in the U.S., and where, with a county map.
  • How long training takes after medical school.
  • The share of women, and of physicians near retirement.
  • The Medicare services they provide and the drugs they prescribe.
  • The hospitals and medical schools most connected to them.
  • Payments from drug and device companies, and research in the field.

How to use the medical specialties list

Patients can use it to learn what each kind of doctor does. For example, the cardiology page shows the tests cardiologists perform most for Medicare patients. Students, meanwhile, can compare training length, workload and the share of women across fields.

In addition, students can compare specialties side by side in how to choose a medical specialty. Training lengths are in residency and fellowship length by specialty, and workload is in work RVUs by specialty.

How specialties are defined

We group clinicians by the primary taxonomy code in the NPI Registry. These codes come from the NUCC Health Care Provider Taxonomy (opens in a new tab). As a result, a clinician appears once, under the specialty they list first. Read our methodology for details.

Questions about the medical specialties list

How many medical specialties are there? Our medical specialties list includes every physician specialty and clinician type in the NPI Registry that has enough clinicians to describe. Some very small fields are grouped with a broader specialty. So if you can’t find a field, try its broader name.

Which specialty takes the longest to train? Sort the table by Training to see. Surgical subspecialties such as neurosurgery and cardiothoracic surgery take the longest.