Dies Irae said:
espbeliever,
I am on your side, believe it or not, and I would perfectly willing to believe that DOs have more "training and insight" than MDs, if you can show me evidence that there is a significant difference in the medical school curricula of DO schools that warrents such a statement. Ask any MS-III MS-IV DO student doing rotations if he believes such a great distiction exsists between an MD and a DO. I am not saying that the difference is analogous to DDS/DMD, but I am saying that the difference become practically inconsequential once you start your practice. Just going by personal impressions of specific doctors whom we know doesn't cut it as hard evidence, and will only spawn more beef from the vocal minority of superficial of pre-MDs who are just looking for any reason at all to espouse their biases. Perhaps I should have used the word equivalent rather than equal.
I think there is SOME difference, i cannot at this time put "some" into hard factual terms, but ive seen many different curricula, and i noticed a trend within the DO college community to enforce a higher percentage of primary care type rotations. beyond that, and omm, i see no difference at all through the many classes...
Dies Irae said:
When you say MDs "specialize and have no social life," people read it as if you are linking the two.
man, from the doctors i have met/known (maybe 15 or so) that were specialists, they always wanted more of a family life. and in talking with many fp's, they brag about their trips and family time and everything. i dunno, perhaps it is perception, but it appears that primary typically has more time. i think you could show this also through national surveys the gov does. i thought i had seen how most of the specialists did >50 and most of the surgeons >60 somestimes >70 hrs a week, whereas primary care was normally <50, and em for example was about 38 hrs a week worked on average.
i guess that is just something i personally worry about, i have no social life right now except my books. i do hope for a family someday. i see it as being a real struggle to balance a 60+ hr work week with a family. i know it can be done... all of life is a fight i suppose... yeast... did you ever read sea wolf?? interesting thoughts....
Dies Irae said:
(Them is fightin' words!) Lots of specialists are so dedicated to their work that they choose not to have a social life. Likewise, there are millions of people across the country with no medical education whatsoever who don't have a social life. There are people whose social lives exist solely on everquest and couterstrike servers.
- hah thats me but not cs, im on cs:source hehe
Dies Irae said:
If you can make the same comparison WITHIN a class at an MD or DO school, i. e. the students doing primary care vs. the students doing specialization, then it can't really apply to a comparison of MD vs. DO schools. It always comes down to what an individual makes of his medical education. A friend of mine who is also starting his first year at a DO school told me that DO vs. MD is like Mac vs. PC, (wherein Macs are better machines with less errors and faster processor speeds, but PCs are overwhelmingly more popular) I have to disagree with his analogy because, first, I am not sure we can measure the processing speed of physcians, and second, I would NEVER use a Mac, and nothing in the universe can convice me to do so! The us vs. them mentality with a lot of future DOs out there is counterproductive.
does your friend know that Mac is planning on switching to using intel cpus? there goes the APlle world as we know it...
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/showthread.php?t=204692
too bad... AMD is much better and cheaper....
😀
Dies Irae said:
It is true that DO schools focus their curricula on primary care, and some DO schools even require extra residency time in FP before specialization, but that does not mean that DOs are better primary care doctors, and there is no hard data indicating so.
that alone does not mean that DOs are better, but it does give a person the chance to be better that average. obviously more experience doing something will lead to more efficient/accurate results. that is the basis for all neural networks... well that and weights, but those change with experience so it still comes down to experience.
further, havent you seen that while DOs comprise of 5% of the total physician population, they fill 10% of all primary care roles. you could continue to argue that even that does not mean that they are BETTER than MDs but, the premise of my arguement was that most DOs generalize, vs most MDs specializing. at least i think it was, i might have messed up in there somewhere... yea probably did, but this here is what i meant
😛 hehe
im not trying to win brownie pts here with you or anyone. i guess part of me is upset that that there is rift between many specialty areas and DOs. i am not upset because it may/may not be harder on me, but just because of the us vs them scenerio we all are always speaking about. where is that perfect world we all dreamt about when we were younger??
i am extremely happy to be accepted to my DO school. FP is what i always wanted to be. i knew a few doctors in FP that went here and highly recommended it to me. so i applied to it and kcom. i do plan on using omm because i still believe that anytime you can help someone without drugging them is a good thing.
Dies Irae said:
There are 22 US DOs schools vs. the 120+ US MD schools. DOs are a something like a 5% minority when it comes to physicians, and as long as that is so, there will be a prejudice against DOs among the prestegious. But if you really have your heart set on neurosurgery or ortho, you proabably should have applied to MDs schools in the first place. There are still pds out there, albiet few, who wouldn't even consider a DO for a residency spot regardless of how he does on the boards, but even those prejudices many dissolve by the time we are matching for our residencies. But making unsupported claims that DOs are inherently better primary care physicians will only widen the rift. Just think about how far the profession has come in the past few decades. In the 50s, DOs were considered quacks on the level of homeopathy and Christian Scienice, of course, the educational standards for obtaining a DO degree were nothing like they are today.
😛 im a christain. oh boy, i bet that just opened a whole can of worms. im a very devout christain at that.
i do agree that if you wanted to specialize then going MD is your best bet, and that is what i have been trying to say. and that is not saying that ONLY MDs specialize but its normally an easier route to where you want to go. if you have noticed the trends in gpa, the distinction between MD and DO is hair thin... so just go where you want to go.
👍
Dies Irae said:
The trend towards "holistic" and preventative medicine is emerging throughout the field, and I don't think there is any evidence that suggest that DOs are given a significant amount of extra training wherewith they can lay special claim to it. OMM is a big issue with our coming generation of DOs, because so few DOs actually use it. And without OMM, the distiction between MDs and DOs would be so insignificant that there would be no point in schools granting a DO degree rather than and MD degree. Even though very few DO students actually take an OMM residency, it is still within the scope of primary care physicians to use OMM to treat back pain, etc.
i think the holistic/preventative medicine thing was something pretty unique to DOs for a time. but as with all things that are seen as improvement, this was implemented in with MDs. and i think probablly wrong things like cranial are leaving.
im sorry to have offended anyone or stepped on toes, just expressing my opinions. and that is what basically they are. i think of MDs as mostly specializing, and DOs as mostly going primary. this i think has had a lot to do with my choice of DO. hope ya'll have a great evening, and choose wisely the rest of your life.
Some people have to work harder than others to achieve the same academic results.
