Forbes December 1, 2025
In medicine, specialties tend to fall into two broad camps.
Some physicians spend their days diagnosing problems, interpreting data and prescribing treatments. These cognitive fields — including primary care, neurology and psychiatry — rely on clinical reasoning to guide patients through illness.
Others focus on performing procedures: inserting catheters, replacing joints and removing tumors. In interventional specialties (including cardiology, neurosurgery, orthopedics and urology), expertise takes the form of technical skill and procedural mastery.
Within the culture of medicine, these two factions have long jostled for prestige and power. For most of healthcare’s history, diagnostic prowess made internal medicine the envy of its peers, placing it at the top of the professional hierarchy.
But two technological advances turned that relationship on...
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