Finished MD/PhD training in 6 years and am nearly finished residency. I would do it over again, absolutely. I will not be running in the basic science race and instead will focus on clinical work (not at all what I planned as a mudphud, but exactly what I want to do now); with that in mind here are the reasons I value my training path:
1. No debt for 2 extra years of HARD work seemed like a good deal then and it seems like an even better deal now. Importantly, this allowed me to consider living in places I would not have been able to comfortably afford otherwise.
2. My PhD mentor was (and still is) in my corner, it is great to have influential people looking out for you at different phases of your career.
3. Medical school would have been too boring for me otherwise, I was in the lab from day one and approached learning the basic sciences in a different way than I think I would have as an MD-only student.
4. Leadership MD/PhD training gave me great opportunities to develop leadership/communication skills
turns out these are pretty important.
5. Professional writing/speaking The science part of graduate training was actually pretty easy in my opinion (read a bunch of papers, hypothesize, design, perform, troubleshoot experiments), but learning to write it all down in some coherent fashion, then get up and convince a room full of scientists that what you did was novel and important, that takes time and an experienced teacher. I cant imagine I would be nearly as good at this if I had not had the MD/PhD experience and I currently use these skills on a regular basis.
6. Opened doors in the match, no question.
7. Flexibility Not always a good thing, but turns out I am pretty happy I didnt just get a PhD, as I originally considered, since this training path has let me choose the career that best fits.
MD/PhD training was a good fit for me intellectually when I started down this path and, though I may not be pursuing an R01 (hats off to anyone who is with the current funding climate), left me with a solid skill set to build on as a resident. That being said, I see some MD/PhD applicants who take 9-10 years and have only one first author paper
I think the return on time invested in MD/PhD training diminishes significantly beyond 7 years, unless you know you want to stay in basic science and it allows you to spend less time as a post-doc.
