Carteret Heart and Vascular: Where's the cardiologist at this "cardiology office"?
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You want to see a cardiologist? Sorry, best I can do is a DNP with five college degrees and certificates.
If you live in the Emerald Isle, NC area and you're looking to establish care with a cardiologist, you might very reasonably think that there's one to be found at a place called "Carteret Heart & Vascular". Indeed, that's a very reasonable assumption for any member of the general public to make. They have cute little hearts on the homepage of their website...
A Facebook page for a "Doctor" with a description that says "cardiology office"...
and finally, no less than ten different patient "testimonials" about "Doctor" Waddell and how great he supposedly is on the homepage.
Fuckin' hell, we're board-certified physicians and if we didn't know better, after seeing all this we also would've thought that the "Doctor" at this clinic was a real, live cardiologist. But alas, at a time when whole milk is in vogue, Tylenol causes autism, and the food pyramid is flying inverted like Maverick in Top Gun, not everything is as it seems. When we had a medical student cutout call up the Carteret Heart and Vascular office posing as a new patient, the receptionist would conveniently mention their "provider" every time the word "cardiologist" or "doctor" was used. Although we didn't instruct our operative to explicitly ask them what they meant by "provider", at no point was any clarification provided with regard to the degrees or qualifications of their "provider".
As it turns out, this mysterious provider is Jeremy Waddell, the "Doctor" at, and owner of Carteret Heart and Vascular. In no uncertain words, he is no cardiologist at all. "Doctor" would even be pushing it, since he's not actually a physician, but a nurse practitioner with a DNP ("doctorate" of nursing practice) degree. Mr. Waddell has been kind enough to share a long, rambling bio of himself on his office website, where he talks about how his "cardiology practice" was born and filling the need for a "specialist in cardiovascular disease":
You can tell that everyone and their mother is absolutely rushing to buy his edifying and groundbreaking "textbook", Waddell's Theory of Cardiology, because despite our best efforts to source a copy, we couldn't find one anywhere. Those "multiple colleges and universities" must have bought them all up, eh? Why would anyone spend four years in medical school, three years in internal medicine, and bust their ass off to make themselves competitive enough to match into a cardiology fellowship when they could just read a book about the specialty written by a nurse practitioner instead? A "doctorally-prepared" nurse practitioner who holds "five college degrees and certificates", no less!
"So what kind of doctor is he?" You can tell a lot of copium was needed to write this bio, as Mr. Waddell describes his degree as "similar to many other professional doctorates". We've written extensively about DNP degrees before and if we're being charitable, they're less valuable than a 30-pack of Kirkland Signature toilet paper. At least you can wipe your ass with the latter. And "combined, he was in college for a total of 13 years"? What the fuck?
We're also left scratching our heads with Mr. Waddell's claim that his degree is in "Adult and Gerontology Primary Care with a focus in Cardiovascular disease". The website for Duke University's AGPCNP program makes no mention of this so-called "focus", and quite hilariously, the only Google search result for that phrase as of this writing leads back to his bio page on the Carteret Heart and Vascular website. Perhaps he's referring to the Duke DNP program's option to obtain a "clinical certificate" in Cardiology:
Surely, a nurse practitioner who's spent 168 clinical training hours "under the mentorship of an expert clinician in a cardiovascular specialty" and taken a whopping three rigorous courses would run circles around an ABIM/AOBIM board-certified physician who's successfully completed the aforementioned four years of college (not 13 😂), four years of medical school, three years of internal medicine residency, and three years of cardiology fellowship (and possibly more subspecialty fellowship training time for interventional cardiology, cardiac electrophysiology, structural heart disease, etc.), only to be called a cardiologist. If I had problems with my pacemaker that needed to be diagnosed or programming changes that needed to be made to it, guess who I would go see? Not a midlevel nurse practitioner "with a focus in cardiovascular disease", that's for damn sure!
Finally, it's worth noting that North Carolina is, thankfully, one of the states that does not grant full practice authority to nurse practitioners and legally requires a written collaborative practice agreement between physicians and the midlevels they supervise. North Carolina also happens to be one of the states that offers some transparency with regard to being able to see who's supervising whom:
Robert "Lee" Jobe, MD, FACC, FSCAI is an interventional cardiologist who appears to be employed at UNC Health/UNC Health REX in Raleigh, NC, which happens to about 150 miles away from Carteret Heart and Vascular. Yeah, we actually checked Google Maps for you. One has to wonder about the motivations that lead an interventional cardiologist who is probably making the big bucks to supervise a lowly nurse practitioner with supercilious credentials 150 miles away who's running a "cardiology office", but that's above our pay grade. The 2025 Doximity Physician Compensation Report listed an eye-watering annual compensation of $587,360 for cardiologists, which is about $587,359 more than what we got paid to write this article. Motivations aside, how in the hell does one clinically supervise someone who's 150 miles away? Teleportation? In our opinion, you just can't, at least not with any degree of medicolegal robustness that would withstand even the slightest bit of scrutiny in a courtroom.
