[citation needed] After earning his medical degree in 1921, he became assistant to Dr A. Hintzen in the internal medicine department of the Calvarienberg hospital in Maastricht.

His paper was titled "De venapols en naar aanleiding daarvan enige beschouwingen over het hart mechanisme" or "Venous pulses and some reflections on the circulatory system".

[4] His supervisor was the Professor Wilem Einthoven, who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on 24 October later that year for the "discovery for the of the mechanism of the electrocardiogram".

In 1955, van Buchem wrote a paper titled "An uncommon familial systemic disease of the skeleton: Hyperostosis corticalis generalisata familiaris" along with H. N. Hadders and R. Ubbens on the two patients, which appeared in Acta Radiologica.

[10] The further study of this newly discovered disease was one of the two subjects which dominated the latter years of van Buchem’s scientific research.

This interest in blood lipids brought him into contact with Frits Böttcher and together, along with a few others, researched atherosclerosis and the deterioration of human arteries.

During his time as a professor, he made many study trips to the United States, where he became particularly aware of the advancements in cardiology and cardiac surgery.

In 1952, he was dispatched by the World Health Organization as a member of an international team to India, Burma and Ceylon, with the assignment to lecture and advise developments in cardiology.

The road that leads from Ringbaan Zuid to the new Elisabeth hospital on Hilvarenbeekseweg in Tilburg, the Prof. van Buchemlaan, is named after him.