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I know ur against it lol.First of all, if you read my posts, you'll see that I'm 100% against MD/DO or any combination or any change to my DO degree and I'm willing to fight it on SDN and in court any day.
The problem with the DPNs introducing themselves as Dr. is that there is an element of deception where the patient may think s/he is physician therefore, invalidating the informed consent (the burden is on the practitioner to make sure the consent is truly an informed consent). On the other hand, if there was a change and the degree became MD/DO vs DO, there is no difference in level of care as far as the US law is concerned (MDs can argue MDs provide better care and DOs can argue DOs provide better care until they are blue in the face, but the law is clear DO = MD+OMM). Therefore, the informed consent is not violated.
and the informed consent thing is a valid point. What I was mostly getting at is only that i think the motivating factors for this are suspect. It strikes me as substanceless re-branding and I think it is a little ridiculous. It would be like going into OB/Gyn and calling myself a gynecological surgeon just because there is an over-representation of procedures as compared to other clinical specialists. The implication is that 2 doctorate degrees were earned and that really isnt true. OMM is not a doctorate in and of itself which is why i said i didnt have an issue with moving to an MD/DO degree if it is understood that the DO portion is similar in impact to a distinction tract or "focus".
DO schools cost substantially more than MD schools in the vast majority of cases.Also, the problem with medical degree is that the initials for the degree and license are the same. The solution (if one assumes that there is a problem to begin with which I personally don't), is to change the LICENSE initials to some random letters (e.g. XYZ) such that XYZ meant physician for everyone regardless of DEGREE. For instance, licensed engineers get PEs regardless of what type of engineer they are or which degree they got (BS vs MS vs PhD).
What is this "pay to play" stuff you have mentioned multiple times now and I keep hearing on SDN.... I went to a DO school, had a great education and was very satisfied with my experience while being in a environment that not everything was a competition like some other schools. So, I'm not sure what you are referring to but I'm sure you'll explain!
ive made this exact same argument in antoher thread we were in on. I do believe that the more highly selective schools have on average a more successful student. I think the students at hopkins or northwestern on average have a higher ability than the students at my school. That doesn't mean that every one of them is smarter than every one of us, and since we are talking about a collective of bodies and not a pure continuum it follows that there will very likely be students in a lower tier group which are more able than those in a higher tier group. The difference in mcat between MD and DO is about 5 on average? If we accept MCAT's predictive value with error, and also acknowledge the range around the ~25 and ~30 needed for DO and MD respectively it is likely that a significant portion of the students overlap. This is why I am comfortable applying this logic widely because I understand that I am subject to it as well when I compare myself against students in the oober top schools.Given the option (almost) everyone wants to go to Hopkins and Harvard. But not everyone does. Following your logic I can argue that your school was a backup for you and therefore your abilities are not the same as someone who went to Hopkins (I don't know you, it may be true, it may be false). However, the only thing we can deduce is that your MCAT taking abilities are not up to par with someone who went to Hopkins. Whether or not that translates into you (or people with your score) becoming a good physician or not can't be deduced from MCAT scores.
What you are missing is that there is a score at which point a higher score doesn't necessarily translate into higher success rates or higher intellectual abilities for the purposes of becoming a physician (i.e. there is a plateau in the graph). None of us know for a fact what that magic number is. You can argue 35 and I can argue 20. What we know for sure is that a 45 is good enough to be a physician and a 3 is not. Anything else is speculations.
And this is why i didnt want to use the word "backup", because my school was my first pick for me. I would have loved to go to hopkins but it wasnt in the cards. I dont feel like my school is a backup and neither should you or anyone regardless of school - and if you do then you dun messed up. That said, most of us stacked up our resumes, took a good look at them, and then shot our applications out where we thought we had the best chance of getting in.
Think about it like an odds ratio from a cohort study. There are plenty of exposures which will increase or decrease OR by whatever levels... Just because I have said exposure does not mean that I will have the outcome. There is an OR related to MCAT score as far as success in school goes, and this is indicated in the correlative studies between MCAT and boards and also the links i posted (which I will defend in a minute)
I put a couple words in bold up there. "good" - this is an absolute term. Nobody has suggested or even implied that any current DO student will not make a "good" doctor. The only possible implication that has been made is that increases in MCAT can make one "better", but this does not make anyone below that mark un-"good". and "necessarily" -you are right, it doesnt necessarily predict ability. That is an almost direct paraphrase of what I have been saying about it being a predictor of ability vs an absolute scale. using the word "necessarily" like you did is a qualifier which only indicates a set of exceptions to the rule, but does not negate it. if, instead, what you meant to say was "the MCAT does not predict ability" that is different. "necessarily" means that there is some truth to it but we cannot make specific conclusions from it. it's like a bad p-value
the underlined thing I agree with and I am not sure what I said to make you think I dont. This is exactly what I have been getting at. as I said here and in other threads, "better" and "worse" do not equal "good" and "bad". relative vs absolute terminology.... more of this happens here where you say
Let me give you an example which will hopefully illustrate this: Let's say we are hiring janitors; I would argue that anyone with a IQ of 85 or higher is smart enough to be a janitor. Now if your IQ is 85 vs 100 vs 125 vs 180, it makes no difference; You have what it takes (in the IQ department at least) to be a janitor. Same argument applies here. Now if you have data to show that there is a magic number (based on quality of care or competence to practice medicine) I'd love to see it. Otherwise, it's irrelevant.
ya, nobody is arguing that nor was anything to the contrary even so much as suggested. if you recall, much of what we are talking about is in response only to the absurdity of the "we have to do more" statement. It comes up in any comparison. PA is one w the courses vs time artument, had a chiropractor tell me that they do more neuro than med students do.... basically I just don't want to be told by someone that I have consistently outscored that they have to do something harder or more challenging or requiring of higher ability. that's ridiculous. Other such comparisons are just skewed data... vet or dental school harder to get into than med? well.... there is a supply and demand thing going on there if true at all, by the simple fact that raw scores (just GPA, although awhile back I saw plenty of anecdotal evidence of people with lower MCATs going back and destroying the DAT to pursue a different career) are higher among medial applicants. i.e. while the average dental student might face more competition, the scores of the average medical applicant are well above the average dental applicant and therefore ease of entry is being dumbed down to simple #accepted/#applied or something to that effect. The point being - lots and lots of statements get made which have implications that are exaggerated at best. The DO = MD+ thing is one of them.
What are you talking about? The AAMC data ONLY includes academic reasons while the AACOM data includes Withdrawals and Leave of absences in addition to dismissals. All three could be due to non-academic reasons and the first two are almost always due to non-academic reasons, which AAMC data doesn't reflect. Also leave of absences are NOT necessarily permanent and those people may come back.
Non-academic reasons: Professionalism, Death, Serious accident/injury/disability, Change your mind about medical school, Family needs, etc.
Let's keep the discussion objective. You can't compare apples and oranges. AACOM data and AAMC data are not comparable as they report different things. Comparing those two figures is no different than comparing two random numbers and then drawing conclusions regarding such comparison. Neither you nor I have any idea what the attrition rate only due to academic reasons are at DO schools. However, I can tell you that at my school (n=1), there is usually 0-2 dismissals due to academic reasons out of a class of 120+ (all 4 yrs) which boils down to 1% (all 4 yrs). So, this part of your post is misleading at best.
These studies arent perfect, but they arent as vastly different as you believe. The AAMC study gives academic reasons only so we have those numbers. 1.5% by year 4 or ~0.375% per year. Im also not sure if these numbers are MD only or MD+DO, because the AAMC publishes MCAT numbers for both groups.
But if we look at the AACOM data and apply a little common sense....
Non academic reasons for withdrawl or leave of absense - death, illness, whatever....
The trend goes from ~3% to ~2% to 1% and then back up to 2% pretty regularly for all of the years sampled across the entire country. Unless you are suggesting that there is a statistically significant decrease in illness, family deaths, uh..... bank robberies? for 3rd year DO students as compared to other years, the trend is very likely to be academic. The published numbers for dismissal vs other show about even spread at 1.5% each, and these numbers are weighted towards the first two years. your argument is to basically treat those numbers as not having any academic component but id argue that leaves of absence can have academic motivators just as they can also not. Dismissal often has academic reasons. Withdrawl isnt necessarily (theres that word again....) different than drop-out.
But the point is - there is no reason that I can think of other than academics to yield such a reproducible pattern. As I said, the alternative is that you claim a nearly 200% increase in the chance of "Professionalism, Death, Serious accident/injury/disability, Change your mind about medical school, Family needs, etc." in MS1 year vs MS3, and I would suggest that these non-academic reasons have no reason not to be evenly distributed across the years. ergo the trends are academic in nature. its an assumption.... but I am fairly comfortable with it
To compare DO attrition rate of (<10% over 4 years) with carib attrition rate of ~50% over 4 years is just absurd. Also, I would restate that based on your data we don't know the REAL attrition rate at US MD schools.
Now since your assumption is incorrect, I'm not going to address the rest of your post which was based on that assumption.
and again I think you tend to react strongly to examples of extreme. IF MCAT predicts success to even a minute degree, then the carib attrition rates, DO attrition rates, and MD attrition rates are all just a statistical probability based on that prediction.