Jobs / Healthcare / 29-1229.04
Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Physicians
Diagnose and treat disorders requiring physiotherapy to provide physical, mental, and occupational rehabilitation.
- US jobs
- 342,720 (SOC 29-1229 group, "Physicians, All Other")
- Median wage
- $265,930 a year
- Job family
- Healthcare
Can agents do the work of physical medicine and rehabilitation physicians?
We read the evidence at the level of the job family, Healthcare:
- Task levelPartialOne benchmark, from early 2025. On Stanford's MedAgentBench, where agents do clinical tasks in a simulated electronic health record, the best recorded model completes 69.7% of tasks (Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2). It has no maintained leaderboard, so newer models are not measured. No benchmark in our collection tests work with patients.
- Project levelPartialOnly adjacent evidence. GDPval includes nurses among its 44 occupations. OpenAI reports that GPT-5.5's deliverables won or tied against professionals' work in 84.9% of comparisons across all occupations. No benchmark in our collection tests clinical work over days, such as managing a patient's care.
Benchmarks for the job family
These cover work in healthcare, not always this occupation's tasks.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Typical tasks
From O*NET 31.0. Core tasks first. Few of these tasks have a benchmark today.
- Document examination results, treatment plans, and patients' outcomes.
- Examine patients to assess mobility, strength, communication, or cognition.
- Develop comprehensive plans for immediate and long-term rehabilitation, including therapeutic exercise, speech and occupational therapy, counseling, cognitive retraining, patient, family or caregiver education, or community reintegration.
- Assess characteristics of patients' pain, such as intensity, location, or duration, using standardized clinical measures.
- Monitor effectiveness of pain management interventions, such as medication or spinal injections.
- Provide inpatient or outpatient medical management of neuromuscular disorders, musculoskeletal trauma, acute and chronic pain, deformity or amputation, cardiac or pulmonary disease, or other disabling conditions.
- Consult or coordinate with other rehabilitative professionals, including physical and occupational therapists, rehabilitation nurses, speech pathologists, neuropsychologists, behavioral psychologists, social workers, or medical technicians.
- Prescribe orthotic and prosthetic applications and adaptive equipment, such as wheelchairs, bracing, or communication devices, to maximize patient function and self-sufficiency.
- Diagnose or treat performance-related conditions, such as sports injuries or repetitive-motion injuries.
- Perform electrodiagnosis, including electromyography, nerve conduction studies, or somatosensory evoked potentials of neuromuscular disorders or damage.
- Coordinate physical medicine and rehabilitation services with other medical activities.
- Prescribe physical therapy to relax the muscles and improve strength.
Other job titles for this occupation (18)
Acute Rehabilitation Unit Physiatrist · Attending Physician · EDX Medicine MD (Electrodiagnostic Medicine Medical Doctor) · MD (Medical Doctor) · Pain Management Physician · Pediatric Physiatrist · Physiatrist · Physician · PM and R MD (Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Medical Doctor) · Rehabilitation Physician · DO Physician (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine Physician) · Interventional Pain Physician · Interventional Physiatrist · Medicine Physician · Pain Medicine Physician · Physical Medicine Physician · Physical Medicine Rehabilitation Physiatrist · Rehabilitation Specialist