SAFE
This catch-all bucket covers licensed diagnosing/treating clinicians who don't fit the named titles — naturopathic physicians, hyperbaric specialists, kinesiotherapists, orthoptists, cardiovascular perfusion and similar hands-on roles — and the modal worker spends most hours physically examining, treating, and monitoring patients in person. AI is already taking over the chart notes, coding, history intake, patient education handouts, and literature lookups, but it cannot palpate, position, operate a device on a live patient, or hold the license that authorizes the treatment plan. The regulatory shield is real but state-by-state and thinner than MD/RN licensure for some titles in this bucket, so it varies by specialty.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+2%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 28,630 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Hard to automate, and growing
The work resists current AI and the BLS projects +2% more of these jobs by 2034. Note that safe does not mean well paid — several of the fastest-growing resistant occupations are among the lowest paid on the register.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~2,400 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
AuristDoctorInternOculistResidentHerbalistNaprapathOsteopathPhysicianNaturopathOrthoptistDoctor (Dr)Herb DoctorHerbologistOrthopedistPhysiatristCardiologistHematologistImmunologistMedicine ManNephrologistProctologistAcupressuristAcupuncturist
The BLS uses Healthcare Diagnosing or Treating Practitioners, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: embodiment . Weakest point: task resistance .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier A perfusionist running the pump during cross-clamp, an orthoptist measuring strabismus deviation with prisms on a squirming six-year-old, or a hyperbaric tech pressurizing a chamber are tasks no model performs — but the same worker's documentation, insurance pre-auth, patient handouts, and outcome-tracking spreadsheets are already being drafted by software, which is why this sits at 13 rather than 17.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments The work happens with hands on a patient in rooms that are not controlled — an OR with a bleeding field, a dive chamber at 2.4 ATA, a rehab gym floor where a kinesiotherapist bears a patient's weight during gait training — and a 16 rather than 19 reflects that some of this bucket (naturopathic consults, treatment planning) is done seated across a desk.
Licensed human required and personally liable Perfusionists hold state licensure or ABCP certification and are named in surgical incident reports; naturopathic physicians are licensed to diagnose and prescribe in roughly half the states and unlicensed in the rest, and orthoptists work under ophthalmologist supervision — that patchwork is what pulls this to 15 instead of the 18-19 an MD or DDS gets.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls A perfusionist deciding on flow rate, hemodilution, and when to warn the surgeon about rising lactate makes calls in minutes with no protocol that covers the specific patient; the 15 reflects that these are consequential but bounded by a surgeon, ophthalmologist, or physician who owns the overall case.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (13/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (15/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (15/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (15/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 45 of this occupation's 74 points (61%).
Embodiment (16/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 85/100, still SAFE.
State-by-state licensure closure for the unlicensed/partially-licensed titles in this bucket: e.g. additional states adopting naturopathic doctor licensing acts (currently ~half of states), and states adding title protection plus mandatory certification for cardiovascular perfusionists (only a minority — e.g. Illinois, Ohio, New York — license perfusionists today). Each new act makes a named human the legally accountable signer for a treatment plan or an extracorporeal circuit run.
Task-mix shift: once documentation, coding, intake and literature review are fully absorbed by AI scribes, the residual hours are almost entirely intra-procedure calls under ambiguity — pump flow and anticoagulation decisions on a deteriorating patient, hyperbaric dive abort decisions, orthoptic surgical referral judgments. The role's remaining content is the judgment tier.
Same two-tier shift: the automatable tier here is clerical and educational, not clinical, so its removal raises the fraction of the day AI cannot do at usable quality. This rises without any regulatory change.
Joint Commission or CMS Conditions of Participation language requiring a credentialed perfusionist/hyperbaric technologist physically present and personally attesting to device parameters during a case, rather than remote or automated monitoring — analogous to the anesthesia CoP requiring a qualified practitioner's presence.
For the wellness-adjacent titles (naturopathic, integrative), buyer demand is explicitly for a human relationship and is largely cash-pay, insulating it from payer-driven substitution; an expansion of employer wellness benefits or state insurance mandates covering licensed ND visits (as Washington and Vermont already require) deepens that.
The limit. Embodiment is already near ceiling at 16 and has no upward route. The bucket's heterogeneity is the real limit: gains from licensure closure accrue only to the specific titles that get licensed, so a bucket-level score can only move a few points even if individual specialties move a lot.
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 5,970 | $166,230 +44% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 2,530 | $133,060 +15% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 990 | $95,080 -17% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 650 | $140,730 +22% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 570 | $107,060 -7% |
| Baltimore-Columbia-Towson, MD | 540 | $128,610 +12% |
| Denver-Aurora-Centennial, CO | 510 | $96,160 -17% |
| Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA | 400 | $109,550 -5% |
| Fresno, CA | 70 | $209,100 +81% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 5,970 | $166,230 +44% |
| Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT | 150 | $154,540 +34% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 74. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.