What are Traditional/Transitional Internships...

Thomas Hearns said:

What are these exactly and what do they lead to? Maybe someone could explain these more to me or point me in the direction of some info... thanks to all!

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It is a year as a medical based intern but they are usually easier years then preliminary medicine with a good amount of elective time. People who do them are generally going into specialties that do not have a included intern year (radiology, derm, anesthesia etc), did not match, or did not relaly have a good idea of what they want to do.

There are five states (OK, MI, FL, WV, PA) which require a traditional rotating internship for DO licensing. If you match straight into an ACGME residency (as 60% of DOs do), you will be missing this requirement. If you decide to do a traditional rotating internship prior to matching ACGME, to cover all your bases, you could run into funding limits on your residency, because it adds a year (not that adding this year is what you're likely to want to do anyway).

This all might matter, or it might not, depending on what specialty you're in and where you want to practice. In some cases (such as pathology, which has no DO residencies) you can file a Rule 42 exception that gets you out of the requirement - you'll need to jump through some hoops, ie give a presentation etc. as part of the exception. It's my understanding that dealing with the traditional rotating vs. ACGME vs. AOA issue is MUCH easier at the start of your residency, than it is 15 years later when you decide to move to Boca Raton.

The Rule 42 page is here: http://www.do-online.org/index.cfm?PageID=sir_postdocabtres42. Of interest is the OGME-1 Core Rotations doc, which lists the rotations you're required to do for a given specialty, in order to qualify for Rule 42, if you do an ACGME residency. General surgery is an example of where things go awry: the AOA requires months of IM in your first year, which no ACGME GS residency (that I know of) includes.

Best of luck to you.

Thomas Hearns said:

Are transitional and traditional the same thing?

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no there are traditional rotating osteopathic internships and trasitional years which are usually allopathic and general easy (hard to get though since optho and derm and rads get most of them)

Thomas Hearns said:

Ah I see. So traditional would be for people that don't really know what they want to do, and transitional are for people going into specialties that require a transitional year, or in a state that requires it?

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not really, both can be used by people who have no clue what they want to do or are reapplying. The traditional osteopathic internship is used to satisfy the state requirements.

Thomas Hearns said:

so what's the difference?

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Hopefully somebody can correct me if my understanding of this is off.

A traditional rotating internship is a DO creation that meets generic requirements of the first year of residency. The majority of DO residencies don't separate this out: your first year in a DO residency meets the requirements, or it wouldn't be AOA approved. As with MD, there are a number of DO residencies that start 2nd year, and for these, you'd do a TRI first. As discussed above, there are other reasons to do a TRI (not sure what you want to do yet, want to do ACGME gen surg and practice in FL, etc.)

A transitional year is an MD creation that also meets generic requirements for first year, and as with DO, it meets the needs of programs that start 2nd year (I think psych is one, maybe radiology?). You could certainly have a transitional year that meets DO TRI requirements, and I would expect most do, but again this varies by specialty. And as above, there are multiple reasons to do a transitional year, but one of them would likely NOT be that you are a DO needing to meet licensing requirements.

The average traditional internship is pretty similar to the average transitional program.

Transitional curriculum (Emory)
http://medicine.emory.edu/residency/curriculum/Transitional 05-06.pdf

Internship:
http://www.mcrmc.org/body.cfm?id=65

The internship has OMM in it, because it is osteopathic. Other than that, its pretty much the same deal.

Thomas Hearns said:

You've been very helpful. I appreciate it, but I'm still a bit confused.

Would the reason you wouldn't want to do a transitional year to fulfill a traditional year is because of funding? How does the funding work exactly? Is this something I should be looking into now, or should I be more worried about it in a few years after I get into medical school?

I don't know what specialty I want to go into, but I would like to be able to go into any specialty and work anywhere... so what would I have to do to fulfill that sort of requirement?

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you really should not even be thinking about this to third year of medical school. Your knowledge of the whole residency process is too limited to really make sense of all this different things. This isnt a bad thing, its suppose to be limited right now and you dont need to have that great of an understanding to start medical school