Originally posted by droliver
I don't know why people are surprised that a situation like this would occur. Osetepathic medicine has a completely different set of accredidation begining with acceptance to school, curriculum, standards & practices, liscencing, etc... I would feel uneasy about automatically rubber-stamping osteopathic experiences for allopathic med school credit without more scrutiny. This reflects on a failure of the student or possibly the student & the med school (in the scenario Kimberli describes) for closely examing the eligibility of these clinical rotations for academic credit.
As a DO doing an allopathic residency, I beg to differ from the statement above.
1) For standards of acceptance into med school, this subject was beaten worse than the proverbial "dead horse", but here I go again- to gain admission into a DO school you need a 4 year degree, you need to take the MCAT, you need good grades and a good score, etc, etc. The difference in MCAT scores and grades is very school dependent. I would say that, on average, DO schools accept applicants with 0. 2 - 0.3 points lower GPA, and MCATS in the mid 20's. Again, this is school dependent. There are several MD schools with admission averages lower than many DO schools. Personally, I attended a DO school with a MCAT of 29 and a GPA of 3.7, which is pretty average entrance stats for many MD schools. Conversely, I was about 10 years older than your average MD student and had a family and a career before entering medical school and applied during a year when application to med school were at a all time high.
2) Curriculum. Yes, there are differences in curriculum, which boil down to DO students having 250 more class hours than their MD counterparts, because of the Osteopathic Manipulation requirement. Least you think this comes at the expense of other subjects such as path or pharm, you would be sorely mistaken. This comes at the expense of extra study time. DO students are in class, on average from 8 am to 4-5 pm every day, for the two pre-clinical years.
3) Standards and practices. I can't even begin to imagine what do you mean by that. KC is a pretty integrated city as DO/MDs are concerned and I challenge you to tell them apart from one another in the wards or in the private practice setting.
4) Licensing - I agree with you that there are some differences there, but they depend more on what you specialize in and where. As I mentioned, I am in an allopathic residency program, in a state where there is only one licensing board for both MDs and DOs. Unless you are in PA, WV, MI, FL and OK, which have separate licensing boards, the licensing requirements are the same for both MDs and DOs. When I got my medical license, it came from the same State Board of Healing Arts which issued the license to the MD residents in my program. When I take my specialty boards, I will be taking the exact same boards as they will. I beg your pardon, but I fail to see the difference. The problem with the individual in question on this tread, is that the events took place in PA, one of the only 5 states which happen to have separate Boards of Healing Arts . I assure you the reason for that is purely political, rather than a matter of competency or qualifications. And the ones pushing for the separation, unfotunately, are the "old guard" DOs. Just as when the AMA wanted to unify both MDs and DOs under the same organization...there are lots of people out there afraid of loosing their "status".
6) Lastly, I will readily concede the point that many osteopathic hospitals and residency programs are not ideal places to train, mostly because they do not have the volume and variety of pathology to provide the experiences needed for residents or students. I would venture to say, however, that this is true of many smaller allopathic community programs. If you do not believe this to be the case, just go to Scutwork and read some of the reviews of many allopathic programs by their residents. By and large, I do believe this to be a weakness of osteopathic education and, as such I have personally decided to pursue an allopathic residency. I also did most of my rotations, as a medical student, at large university hospitals, side by side with allopathic students, and received an Honor grade at 15 out of 19 rotations at these institutions. That certainly made me feel like my curriculum was not different or lacking.The fact that these hospitals were more than willing to have a DO student rotate through their institution, allied with the fact that I was invited to interview at every single allopathic program I applied to, should give some credit to my statement that there isn't much difference in the training DOs and MDs receive these days.
