Here is an excerpt from a 2012 or 2013 article (
http://www.politifact.com/texas/stat...tors-nurses-a/) concerning Rick Perry's inflated claim that Houston had the largest concentration of medical professionals in the world. The article found this claim to be FALSE, but it also includes some interesting stats about the relative size of Houston's medical community. It probably is the fourth largest in the country in raw numbers.
"Spokespeople for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics pointed out that its counts of health care professionals are based on the nation’s metropolitan statistical areas, which can fold in more than one city or county.
For that reason, we were ready to set them aside.
But the Greater Houston Partnership, which promotes the Houston-area economy, answered our inquiry by citing the bureau’s analysis. Spokesman Erik Noriega sent a chart drawing on the bureau’s work suggesting the Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown metro area has the fourth-most individuals (129,930) employed as "healthcare practitioners and technical occupations," a grouping that he said folds in surgeons, doctors, nurses, therapists, medical/clinical technologists and healthcare technicians. The New York (265,020), Los Angeles (206,300) and Chicago (188,340) areas have more workers in the fields, according to the estimates.
Separately, U.S. Census Bureau spokesman Robert Bernstein guided us to a table in its "County and City Data Book: 2007" stating the number of physicians by county for each state in 2004 as well as the ratio of physicians to every 100,000 county residents--a reasonable way of adjusting for population differences. In 2004, the table indicates, Harris County had 11,419 physicians, the fourth-highest total nationally behind California’s Los Angeles County (30,102 physicians); Illinois’s Cook County, home to Chicago (21,189); and New York County (19,849). Separately, a spokeswoman for the Harris County Medical Society, Jennifer Snyder, pointed out that according to the Texas Medical Board,, Harris County had 11,821 physicians as of September 2012."