Question: "How do you become a radiologist in the US?"

Answer: Many years of blood sweat & tears, (and a little luck).

Overview of a 7 step program

1). College or University:

• Graduate from a 4 year college or university with excellent grades.

2). Pre Med:

• Try to get into Medical School during or after college by jumping through multiple hoops. Regardless of who you are you have to excel in the many prerequisite science classes (biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, physics, calculus, etc). These classes are usually taken during college but can be taken after. Get superior scores on the MCAT exam. Get excellent letters of recommendations. Demonstrate success in extracurricular activities. Doing all of these things won’t guarantee acceptance into medical school, it is just the minimum. It would help to win the Nobel Prize. 

3). Medical School:

• Graduate as a Medical Doctor from a 4 year medical school. The amount of information to learn in medical school has been likened to "Drinking from a fire hose." Obtain superior scores on local and national medical examinations. Get more excellent letters of recommendations.

4). Internship:

• Complete a rigorous 1 year ACGME internship in internal medicine or surgery. These generally entail long hard stressful hours with little sleep.

5). Residency:

• Get accepted into a 4 year ACGME radiology residency program. It’s competitive; more doctors want to get in than there are available positions. Once you are in, you soon realize that you have much more to learn than you ever imagined. Willpower, commitment and fear will help to fight exhaustion.

6). More exams:

• Pass a series of challenging written and oral national examinations throughout the training.

7). Graduate from radiology residency:

• Take a moment to contemplate what happened to your youth and wonder how to pay back your student loans.

Additional training:

• Some radiologists will go on to do more in-depth advanced training/fellowship in a subspecialty field of radiology such as Neuroradiology, Neurointerventional Radiology, general Interventional Radiology, Musculoskeletal Radiology, Body Imaging, Nuclear Medicine, MRI, Ultrasound, Women’s Imaging, Pediatric Radiology, etc.
• These optional training programs last an additional 1 to 3 years.

Total time investment:

• For someone such as myself, the total higher education time commitment was 15 years.
• Each medical specialty has different training requirements which reflects the unique challenges of the specific individual field. As a comparison, a general pediatrician or family doctor only needs to complete a 3 year residency program after medical school.

Question: "What is a radiologist?"

Answer:  A radiologists is a highly trained physician who utilizes the latest medical technologies to diagnose illness and direct medical care.

Diagnostic Radiology:

• Radiologists are the only doctors who are specially trained to interpret medical images which include x-rays, ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), nuclear medicine, positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In doing so, radiologists are able to provide other physicians with lifesaving information about their patients. Because of this essential relationship, radiologists have often been referred to as, “A doctor’s doctor.”
• Radiologists are central to patient care and their expertise is indispensible in every medical subspecialty. 

Interventional Radiology:

• Radiologists are also trained to perform minimally invasive image guided surgical procedures such as biopsies, paracentesis, thoracentesis, myelogram, lumbar puncture, kyphoplasty, vertebroplasty,  vascular surgery including aneurysm repair, uterine fibroid embolism, as well as many different infection and cancer treatments.
• Most patients will not see their radiologist unless there is a question or if the radiologist is performing a procedure.

Who is the person who takes my x-ray?

• The people who take your x-ray, MRI, CT, etc are technologists.
• Radiology technologists have completed separate training but did not go to medical school.
• Radiology technologists are not doctors or radiologists.
• However, sometimes a radiologist will help a technologist to obtain medical images.