Thank you. Would you recommend a traditional neuromuscular fellowship, or a CNP-EMG focused fellowship (10m EMG, 2m EEG- would allow doing both)? For epilepsy fellowships, are there 1 year fellowships- or are those CNP-EEG fellowships?Ok since no one else has replied, I'll explain my rationale.
If you want to go private practice or "privademics" as you say and you want to do general neurology with some clinical neurophysiology then a split fellowship with EMG/EEG would be best, although those fellowships are getting rarer as more people pick one or the other. Nowadays, most folks want to do either neuromuscular or epilepsy and choose a fellowship accordingly. I will say for what it's worth I did EEG/epilepsy and work inpatient. Coming from a stroke heavy program I think the EEG training really helped "round me out".
Doing two fellowships will just elongate your time of training for no tangible benefit. There's a significant enough shortage of neurologists even in bigger areas where you won't have trouble finding a job even if it pays less (by virtue of the area, not your fellowship choice). Also for what it's worth I've run into fewer neurologists who are confident in doing EMGs and if I could have a do-over I'd probably pay much more attention to this while I was a resident/fellow.
In summary--don't do two fellowships. You just waste another year of your life for little tangible benefit.
How do you know if one would like surgical epilepsy if the residency itself gives you absolutely no exposure to it (community residency program)? Right now I don’t see the point of doing 2 years just to be epilepsy boarded, but EMG and EEG are great skills to pick up. Atleast many neuromuscular fellowships are still 1 year so it makes a fair bit of sense there.It depends. Do you want to do both 50/50? Then a traditional CNP fellowship would suffice, and would make you decent at both, but not stellar at either. Honestly this is more than enough for private or privademics.
Do you like EMG more? Then do a CNP-EMG or a neuromuscular fellowship. Same goes for epilepsy. The caveat is that now neuromuscular and epilepsy fellowships are starting to encroach into 2 years of training, and the second year is mostly research filler as I understand. I did CNP-EEG and took the epilepsy boards (this pathway is now closed, btw). I will also say with epilepsy the second year makes a difference IF you want to do surgical epilepsy I.E. take people for temporal lobectomies, hippocampectomies, laser ablation, RNS, etc. That I think requires a bit more finesse.
Hope it helps.
