Didactic courses with or without med students?

[boboli_chef]

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This one's for the current dental students... I know there are some programs (UConn, UW) where dental students take the basic sciences with medical students, and some (Case and Louisville come to mind) where dental students work only with each other. What are the pros and cons of each, and is one necessarily better than the other?

 

[ItsGavinC]

If your school is in the mode of teaching you medical school courses anyway, then I don't think it matters much if you have classes together or apart.

If your school doesn't focus much on the medical sciences, then I'm sure many students would suddenly be ticked off to have to learn the additional material if the classes were combined.

For example, I've heard UConn students who are VERY unhappy with the crap they have to learn, which mostly stems from the fact that they are partaking in the med school classes.

We have classes apart because our medical school is in another state, but the way our curriculum is, I have NO doubt that classes would be together if the students were here. At least for the first semester, that is.

Translation: Here at AZ we learn a lot of stuff that probably doesn't directly apply to dentistry, it's good and bad, depending on your mindset. For example, we've had Genetics, Hematology, etc.

 

[UBTom]

Here at the University at Buffalo, we share the campus with the School of Medicine, so we spend a lot of our first two years with the meds taking the same courses.

Our faculty do realize that some of the stuff dental students won't need, so some parts of the courses are abbreviated for us. For example, we don't cover the GU system in Gross Anatomy quite as much detail as the meds do.

I think the way the courses are run here at my school is pretty good... The instructors do go into clinical correlations that are applicable to dentistry but will also benefit med students, such as oral manifestations as a diagnostic tool for diseases such as diabetes and cancers such as leukemia. The dental and medical professions do need to act in concert, and having some classes together to see how things look from both perspectives goes a long way towards promoting that I think.