I think a lot of do's who advocate md=do will be in for a rude awakening come match time. They beat their chest, stop their feet, and start insulting people when people talk about this real do bias. They insist that hard work can trump any and all roadblocks, but that clearly just isn't the case with 70% of the ortho programs.
If DO students are arguing that in general, they are legitimately out of their ****ing minds. In my experience, the students that think that way are so out to lunch that they aren't students getting the class rank, board scores, research, or connections to match anything competitive anyways (ACGME or AOA).
To be more fair, DO students that actually know what they are talking about could use the phrase DO=MD when referring to something such as the possibility to end up in most specialties. For example, it's pretty reasonable to say you could work as an IM physician, earn a normal IM salary, and have a normal career. When it's used in reference to ortho, I think people (the reasonable ones) are saying that you can do ortho as a DO are implying it's via the AOA route. It likely those people aren't specifying ACGME ortho, which would make their claims ridiculous - it just means ortho at all.
In reality, the number is actually probably higher than 70% and instead of explicitly stating it, it's just implied and apps aren't considered with any strong weight. The actual number is probably in the 90s.
With the merger, anything can happen. But I am of the opinion that not much will change in terms of these pd's attitudes of do's.
Agreed - it's fantastical to think the minds of a bunch middle aged academic physicians are going to be changed by the stroke of a pen.
However, I again don't see any reasonable DO students saying this will lead to immediate elimination of bias. The benefit for DOs, aside from the obvious ability to pursue fellowships without the "special applicant clause" if coming from an AOA residency, is the potential for a combined match down the road. In that case, the most competitive DO students could apply to ACGME programs without taking the gamble of skipping the AOA match. This would likely increase matches into competitive fields (but at lower-tier programs) simply because the most competitive DOs (and a higher number of them) will apply. In reality, this only pertains to ortho, uro, ENT, GS, NS, (and I guess theoretically derm and plastics
). I don't think anyone with an opinion worth considering is saying there's going to be DO matching ortho at HSS in a couple years. As of now, the merger only benefits in terms of fellowship and maybe hospital hiring preferences down the road.
You bet it will. Unless you have older D.O.s (who may have not been able to obtain licensing due to MD/DO fights at the state level) on staff who feel an obligation to taking D.O.s.
I don't have a formulated opinion on this - I am not sure if it will hurt DOs looking for competitive specialties or not. Until there is a unified match, wouldn't MDs have to pass on the ACGME match to shoot for a low-tier community program via the AOA match first? I don't know how much that will happen, especially with a mandatory OMM component. If DOs can't outcompete the lowest-tier MD applicants for historically AOA programs with DO PDs, they probably shouldn't be matching anyways. Furthermore, I do suspect there would be some favoring of the DO degree within these programs. One problem would be if there was a loss of of AOA programs during the transition - that would be an obvious way to decrease odds. It will be interesting to see what the adjustment period is like, what the flexibility is like, if there are amendments to the ACGME requirements, and what happens with DO PDs.
