It always cracks me up to see who is saying what and why in these types of threads.
Just by way of introduction, I grew up with two MD parents who went to a top 5 medical school and matched residencies at the best hospitals in the country. You can guess that my test scores aren't too bad (the ability did not mysteriously diminish from one generation to the next) and frankly had no concept of this notion where people weren't "sure if they could get into medical school". For job satisfaction reasons (read: I want to be my own boss in a way that is tough for MDs nowadays), I "rebelled" and went to dental school. At this particular school, we do our entire pre-clinical portion with the meds, take the same tests, etc. That's not why I chose the school, but it does inform my opinion on this subject.
Dentistry tends to attract a lot of smart but self-deprecating types who use humor aimed at themselves to deflect and who are willing to *temporarily* work incredibly hard on the condition that it earns them an incredible work/life balance (I call these types "golden retrievers"), whereas medicine is a bit more likely to attract people who take themselves very, very seriously and have already dreamt up posthumous honors for themselves as someone who gave their entire life away to *saving the human race* (I call these types "German Shephards").
Obviously, these are gross generalizations, and there is plenty of variation (a number of my med classmates are among the sweetest people I've ever met, and as you all know, some dental students are intolerable). In general, our class gets along exceptionally well, and there is very little animosity between the dents and the meds. However, it's important to grasp the general paradigm to make sense of all the silly posturing that goes into threads like these.
I have a couple of reflections from my experiences:
- You can tell right away that a certain portion of the OMFSers carry a certain chip on their shoulder and want to distance themselves from the aforementioned golden retrievers who describe their ideal career as working 30 hours a week. I completely get it. They drive me crazy, too. They come across as soft and entitled.
But... if you quite literally cut faces in half for a living and earn massive money doing so, yet you patrol a forum weekly with 75% of your posts dedicated to telling little tooth jockey dentists and periodontists what a joke they are and making sure they know their place... you have insecurity problems beyond what is typically witnessed on a middle school playground.
To be clear, there are plenty of awesome, dignified OMFS who in every way uphold the lofty title and do both medicine and dentistry proud. There is zero overlap between those people and ostensible grown-ass men who patrol SDN looking for chances to demean others.
- Furthermore, this attitude leads to hyperbole like that medical school is just this torrent of brutality that no dental student can fathom, that we're lucky that these great minds even acknowledge our existence, etc. It's goofy.
At my school, they give us the mean and SD of the final exam scores after every period. Believe it or not, the dents pretty closely follow the symmetry of the class-wide normal distribution. Some of those with agendas (I assume they know how stats work) would expect stark bi-modality (what you'd anticipate from two unequal populations), but that's not what you see. My close friends and I are 1-2 SD above the class-wide mean in every subject, every single time. None of us are going OMFS. Plenty of meds had to reassess courses, and we didn't.
On top of all that, for first year at least, we slogged through significantly more work hours. I'd have gladly traded 4 dental classes for shadowing a PCP clinic (our respective burdens beyond the biomed curriculum).
Understandably, you may want to talk bigger-scale than a little anecdote (or even testing distributions) involving one school - Across the country, yes, there's a modest gap, if you include only US MDs versus DDS and DMD, but
1. This leaves aside that plenty of strong dentals (not even talking outliers) would've had no problem getting into MD schools
and
2. Why on earth are we throwing out DO? DDS and DMD actually have higher incoming GPAs than DO nationally (it was just two years ago that they stopped overwriting retake grades for DO - before you could just keep trying organic until you got an A, and the annual GPA was still only something like a 3.4).
IOW, if you include all US medical schools, most dental students would be worth considering given a couple vocation-specific adjustments (shadowing experience, research topics, etc). So the notion that a large proportion of dental students wouldn't have even gotten a sniff at any med school in the country is silly (assuming they applied nationally and in line with their academics - everybody knows somebody who only wants to go to school in-area and has to change career trajectories).
It's miserable enough to see (some, definitely not all) meds perpetuating the myth that everyone on the planet earth who isn't a physician aspired to be but failed (hyperbole, but only slight). But the former dentists - now exalted and mighty surgeons - should know better. How can you claim to practice evidence-based anything when you offer up fact-free turd sandwiches like that?
- Yes, the step 1 is much tougher than the dental boards. It's not a point worth contending. All the other conclusions that your OMFS overlords would like you to draw from that, like implicit general intellectual superiority? You can toss those away readily. As dumb as it is to claim that the two boards are equal, it's equally dumb to claim that this establishes definitive group differences between takers. Any attempt to do so would be logically fallacious.
Across the country, meds are a bit stronger students on average, but one test difficulty doesn't prove it any more than our first year being more difficult than our med classmates' first year proves that we are better than they are.
And after you take the steps? You're never tested on that stuff again - you take CME and you take your board certification test in *your area of specialty*. This idea that all MDs (or DOs or whatever) truly maintain this endless catalogue in their head forever is fit for children and the delusional.
I'm giving it to you straight as someone who turned down med school (and the "name-y"/expensive dental schools) in order to do something that made sense from a finance and career-fit standpoint. I have no ulterior motive, and nobody is going to praise my job title. I'll just be some guy who is hopefully well-liked in his community. I get nothing out of this except for setting the record straight from the people who are blinded by ego.
The insecure crowd can respond if they like, but I'm not going to go back and forth with people who build their entire lives around their career identity.
Just know that not everyone has the same motivations as you do, and thus you're much better off discussing peoples' motivations than assuming. There are some monster test-takers with great work ethics who want to do dental specialties other than OMFS. Wild, right? And there are the golden retrievers. They bug me too, but if that's the worst person you have in your life, it really ain't so bad, is it?
Or we can just do the judgy-judgy thing. You know the one, where you, OMFS, with your fake MD, are the Richard Feynman of dentists, but still dumber than any physician in the world, including the guy with the 3 year degree from Botswana Medical Community College. Yet he trembles at the might of the Carribean MDs, who grovel at the feet of the DOs, who worship the ground that state school MDs step on, who weep in the presence of the glorious elite MD grads... but then the PCPs from the elite MDs beg forgiveness for sullying the presence of the interventional radiologists, who hide their face in shame when they encounter the neurosurgeons... and they're all massive idiots standing next to a particle physicist.
And all of the above are dumb monkeys who don't even know .0000000000000000000001% of what there is to know about this planet, much less this solar system/galaxy/universe.
Get over yourself. Just do your f---ing job. The locker room anatomy comparisons are embarrassing. If insecure meds try to force you into them (and they're wildly insecure if they ask another professional if their boards are "hard" - none of them are dumb enough to miss the disrespect there), ask them how much they know about your job and scope of practice. Even the meds at my school know almost nothing on that topic, so it can actually be an incredibly worthwhile conversation. This works well with PCPs, for example, because it just so happens that grafting and implants are more interesting than 99% of what they do, yet they have no idea what those procedures are.
But for goodness sake, don't play the stupid game.
Peace out.
