She's referring to me, not to the premed posters. I am an MD/PhD who earned a PhD first, then went to medical school on full scholarship at one of the fancy name-brand, research-intensive schools that sometimes get salivated over on this site. I served on the med school's adcom for four years. Afterward, I applied for/completed residency, and I am therefore very familiar with going through the residency app process as an MD/PhD applicant. I have now been on the faculty at a medical school for the past two years, during which time I have been involved with interviewing some of our residency candidates.
While it is true that my opinions are indeed merely one person's opinions, WH's point is that not everyone posting here is a naive premed who doesn't have any insight into how the process works. And particularly if YOU are a premed or preclinical student who lacks any adcom experience (it's unclear from your prior posts what your exact training status is), it would behoove you to not go around calling other people's opinions "lies" when you are almost certainly no better informed or experienced yourself than are most of the people whom you are criticizing.
Regarding the substance of the discussion here, I stand by what I said before, that while you are correct that having a PhD is not meaningless (particularly to a research-oriented school like the one I attended), it also is not a silver bullet that will negate a prior poor academic record. If you want to be successful as a PhD-to-MD applicant, then you need to have good UG stats/MCAT *and* a good PhD performance. Med schools don't want either-or; they want both. One of the reasons why my med school app was so successful is because I scored a 43 on the MCAT. And while I didn't have grades from college, I had excellent narrative evals, including my organic prof saying I was the best student in the class, and my gen chem prof saying I was the best student he'd ever taught. So my PhD was icing on the cake; it was not the main ingredient forming the cake itself. And I would argue that this is the way that *all* PhD-to-MD hopefuls should regard their PhDs: as a bonus to an already strong app, not as a Hail Mary attempt to salvage an app that is otherwise subpar.
FWIW, not that this info is very applicable to most of the people on this forum at the moment, but having a PhD is *not* particularly helpful for residency apps, never mind "a huge advantage." Residency PDs are hiring applicants for a clinical position, not as researchers. So what they care most about is your third year clerkship and fourth year sub-internship performance. They also care about the likelihood of you passing your in-service exams (yearly mock specialty boards taken by residents) and the actual boards. So they additionally put a lot of weight on your USMLE scores (particularly Step 1). Some also strongly consider whether you made AOA (med student honor society only open to the top 10% of the class). Finally, LORs are extremely important; each medical specialty is a relatively small world where most of the academic faculty know each other (or at least know of each other). Who you have going to bat for you therefore matters a great deal more at the residency app level than it does at the med school app level.
Many students do research during med school, and just as for premeds, research experience can be a bonus to an already good residency app. Significant research experience is also necessary for those who are applying to physician scientist track residency programs (special residencies called PSTPs meant to groom physician scientists). But even there, what matters more is the applicant's record of research output (pubs, presentations, grants, etc), not whether they have a PhD versus an MS versus no graduate degree at all. A PhD is neither necessary nor sufficient to have a successful career as a physician scientist; there are plenty of successful MD/MS and MD-only physician scientists.
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