The primary turf war that IR is a part of is the battle for peripheral artery disease and endovascular procedures. Vascular surgery and Interventional cardiology are heavily in the mix.
I just finished M3 and am taking a year to do IR research but I also had similar worries as you in regards to IR vs surgery. I did well enough on step 1/clinical grades to pursue whatever field I wanted but eventually chose IR because of the scope of practice as well as future directions. It's an incredibly rapidly expanding field and outside of PAD work, there's interventional oncology procedures (chemoembolizations, ablations) , women's health procedures (uterine fibroid embolizations, pelvic congestion treatments), biliary tract procdures, as well as all the usual trauma work they do (bleeders).
I absolutely love the variety and creativity. Even if you want to do PAD work, luckily (or unluckily depending on how you see it), there's plenty of patients with vascular problems to go around. I did some research in my hometown (mid-sized midwestern city) and there are a lot of IR's doing PAD work. So even in the midst of a turf war with vascular surgery and Interventional cards, there's PAD work to go around. But that's ok. There's still enough work for all 3 specialties.
One thing to note is that IR is very different program to program, city to city. In the program I'm at, they're extremely busy doing "high-end" work because we have an amazing transplant program and IR is always needed in a transplant team if there's a complication (anastamosis failure, stenting strictures, stenting vessels etc.). We also have a robust cancer center so we also have a ton of TACE's, TARE's. If you have more questions about IR and your department doesn't seem to be answering many of your questions, just remember the IR departments vary wildy from institution to institution.
Keep looking into it, dude. I love patient care and I love procedures. I did very well in my surgery rotation and was told to pursue it by multiple people. I STILL decided on IR for, what I believe, are good reasons. IR is one of the few fields that has a marriage between high technology and medicine. That's its selling point. It's technologically-freaking amazing. The procedures are short and sweet with immediate results. The hospital stay for the patient is minimal. Pain is minimal. There's no general anesthesia. And there's always new procedures coming out. With the advent of the clinical interventional radiologist who holds clinics and sees consults, follows up with patients, IR is more like surgery than it ever has been.
Hope that helps. When I was trying to decided b/w IR and surgery, I needed to hear how much people love IR to really convince me. Hence my long response.
