SAFE
This is a catch-all SOC bucket — occupational and preventive medicine physicians, nuclear medicine, hospitalists, aerospace and public-health physicians — so the modal worker mixes patient examination and procedures with documentation, chart review, and interpretation. AI already drafts notes, codes encounters, summarizes literature, and produces first-pass image and lab interpretations, which strips real hours from the day. What does not move is the licensed physical exam, the procedure, the prescription signature, and personal liability for a diagnostic call made on incomplete information.
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
+2.5% 340,700 → 349,300 on the projections basis
Hard to automate, and growing
The work resists current AI and the BLS projects +2.5% 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.
~9,600 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
OwnerAuristDoctorInternOculistSurgeonResidentAllergistOsteopathPhysicianUrologistNocturnistOncologistHospitalistIntensivistNeurologistOrthopedistPathologistPhysiatristRadiologistRhinologistCardiologistHematologistImmunologist
The BLS uses Physicians, 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: liability shield . Weakest point: task resistance .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier A hospitalist's day already runs on tasks models touch — differential generation from chart data, discharge summary drafting, sepsis and deterioration flags, nuclear medicine first-pass reads — but the bedside exam, the family goals-of-care conversation, and the decision to admit or send home on incomplete history stay with the physician, which lands it at 13 rather than the 16+ of a purely procedural specialty.
Hands-on in uncontrolled environments Occupational medicine physicians do worksite walkthroughs and fitness-for-duty exams, hospitalists round on floors and place central lines, nuclear medicine physicians supervise radiopharmaceutical administration — hands on bodies in rooms that are not controlled, but a meaningful slice of this bucket (preventive medicine, public health) works from a desk, which keeps it at 14 instead of a surgeon's 18.
Licensed human required and personally liable Every one of these roles requires an unrestricted state medical licence plus DEA registration to prescribe, board certification for hospital credentialing, and the physician's own name on the order, the death certificate, and the malpractice claim — there is no ceiling above 20 and nothing here that keeps it below it.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls This is the physician who decides whether an ambiguous PET finding warrants biopsy, whether a worker with borderline pulmonary function can wear a respirator, whether to escalate a deteriorating inpatient to the ICU at 3am — calls made on partial data with mortality or livelihood on the line, though clinical guidelines and institutional protocols narrow the space enough to keep it under 20.
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 (20/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (17/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (18/20) 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 55 of this occupation's 82 points (67%).
Embodiment (14/20) 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 89/100, still SAFE.
Task-mix shift: as ambient documentation (Nuance DAX, Abridge) and first-pass image/lab interpretation absorb the routine tier, the residual day concentrates in the judgment tier — equivocal findings, multi-morbidity, disability and fitness-for-duty determinations, outbreak calls. The remaining hours are precisely the ones current models cannot close.
Occupational and aerospace medicine specifically: if FAA aeromedical certification, DOT medical examiner certification, or workers'-comp IME rules continue requiring a named, in-person certified examiner whose signature the employer/insurer is buying, the premium is on the human attestation itself, not bedside manner.
If medical boards or malpractice insurers formalize a duty to override AI recommendations — e.g. carrier policy language requiring documented independent physician reasoning where the clinician departs from or accepts an algorithmic output — the physician becomes the explicit accountable party for the model's errors, which raises rather than lowers the ownership of ambiguous calls.
The limit. liability_shield is maxed at 20; judgment_accountability and trust_premium have little headroom. Realistic ceiling is high-80s. The genuine downside risk is not deregulation but volume: if AI raises per-physician throughput in chart-heavy subspecialties (nuclear medicine reads, preventive-medicine population work), headcount can fall while every remaining role stays safe.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 17,210 | $265,930 +0% |
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 16,950 | $94,820 -64% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 13,580 | $222,410 -16% |
| Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD | 11,380 | $245,810 -8% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 10,650 | $208,710 -22% |
| Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach, FL | 7,890 | $232,960 -12% |
| Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands, TX | 7,010 | $292,490 +10% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 6,810 | $196,760 -26% |
| Burlington-South Burlington, VT | 150 | $517,900 +95% |
| Texarkana, TX-AR | 90 | $516,930 +94% |
| Mansfield, OH | 170 | $478,020 +80% |
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 82. 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.