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Selection bias.Count me in on not wanting to be in a rural location. But those locations have multiple more med oncs and surgeons to justify the rad oncs existence, what’s so unique about us as rad oncs that we don’t want to do it, even when there are financial incentives?
Are we just that much more worldly? (/s)
There's like what, at least 5x more surgeons in practice than RadOncs (probably more than that, just being conservative).
Then, worse, RadOnc was hyper-competitive in a way that enriched for "paper tigers" and people who could play the game enough to crush med school, which often has a subjective component to grading and a level of networking required for CV-boosting opportunities.
Those "soft" skills are part of the "hidden curriculum", and legacy kids with physician parents or other professional/white collar family backgrounds have a higher chance of learning those skills early on, there are more professional/white collar jobs in urban areas vs rural areas - blah blah blah, there's just not a ton of RadOncs in an absolute sense and we had a long stretch of a weirdly self-selecting pool.
Will the crash in interest "fix" this? I doubt it - for the same reason you don't see high numbers of non-physician immigrants moving to Nowhere, USA, I don't see the increase in FMG RadOncs flocking to rural areas either.
But maybe. Who knows. I don't have a crystal ball and anything can happen.