md/phd

[metalhead1023]

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do many physicians do this or are they all reasearchers?

 

[Depakote]

The MD/PhD's I worked for all saw patients. I'm sure there's variation, but if you're getting a MD as opposed to a PhD exclusively, I would assume there is a plan to include a degree of clinical work in your career.

The MD/PhD's I worked for all had practices and their own research projects. Some had their own labs while other simply performed clinical research. They still saw patients several days a week.

 

[metalhead1023]

Good info Depakote. But is it unwise to plan to do as I would with just a MD and not both. I want the PhD for personal reasons.

 

[Depakote]

Good info Depakote. But is it unwise to plan to do as I would with just a MD and not both. I want the PhD for personal reasons.

I'm not sure what the personal reasons are, but for the most part you can do a lot of the research that you'd do with a MD/PhD with an MD.

This isn't a decision you'd really need to worry about now. I'd say do some research in college. If you find that you like it (you'll need a lot for MD/PhD applications and you'll do a lot more on the MD/PhD track) then go for the MD/PhD track... if it's not your cup of tea, then you can still do some research as an MD later.

 

[metalhead1023]

🙂

 

[URHere]

Good info Depakote. But is it unwise to plan to do as I would with just a MD and not both. I want the PhD for personal reasons.

I agree that you still have many years to figure out it MD/PhD is right for you, but let me throw out a few more bits of information for you:

1) MD/PhD programs are generally intended for physicians who want to do translational research (meaning that what comes out of the research lab is directly applicable to patients - cancer therapy, epilepsy treatments, etc.). The general "formula" as it stands now is to go into an MD/PhD program if you want to spend 70-80% of your time in research, and the rest of the time seeing patients.

2) Yes, it is possible for physicians to become involved in research with an MD alone. The downside to this is that if that person doesn't already have a decent amount of research experience, they will probably find it difficult to learn all they need to know during a fellowship (fellowship is like a research residency). The PhD teaches students how to think about research, and it is very helpful if someone plans to spend much of their time in basic science research (basic science = test tubes, proteins, etc). Clinical research (research directly involving human patients) is easy to do without a PhD.

3) You may have a hard time getting into a MD/PhD program down the road if you want the PhD "for personal reasons". MD/PhD programs have many people apply each year solely because they want to have medical school paid for (and they want to reject these people). If you are not passionate about actually doing research, schools may assume that you are a member of that group and intentionally block you out.

4) MD/PhD admissions REQUIRE lots and lots of research. If you are considering this route, get involved in research as an undergraduate and stick with it. If you still like it 4+ years from now...then apply MD/PhD.

 

[metalhead1023]

How do you get Med School paid for by doing more?

This may sound silly but I have a list of goals and getting a PhD is one.

 

[URHere]

How do you get Med School paid for by doing more?

This may sound silly but I have a list of goals and getting a PhD is one.

Most MD/PhD programs in the United States are funded, either by the schools or by the National Institutes of Health. This means that most MD/PhD students have their medical tuition waived AND they receive free medical insurance and a yearly "allowance" of between $20,000 and $26,000 for living expenses.

This happens for a few reasons:

1) The National Institutes of Health and the government are very interested in training physician scientists. In theory, we are the people who are conducting research that will directly help patients, improve the healthcare system, and save them money in the long run.

2) MD/PhDs are in school for MUCH longer than MDs, and they usually make less money once they are out of school. Therefore, it would be hard to convince people to take that route if it required racking up substantial debt, and being less able to pay it off.

3) PhD programs are almost always fully funded, so many people believe that dual degree programs involving a PhD should be also.

Sadly, the fact that MD/PhDs get paid to go through graduate school means that some people try to enter the programs even if they hate research solely because they want the money.

 

[clover86]

Most MD/PhDs do research and practice, with a widely varying balance of the two - but the majority that I've met do more research than practice. The NIH funds these programs with the goal of educating physician-scientists. That's absolutely not to say that you must do research (or that anyone will try to guilt-trip you into it), but keep in mind that during the application process you will need to present a good case for being interested in both research and practicing medicine.

PM me if you'd like more information/opinions (I'm a first-year MD/PhD student). Good luck!

 

[xnfs93hy]

Most MD/PhD programs in the United States are funded, either by the schools or by the National Institutes of Health. This means that most MD/PhD students have their medical tuition waived AND they receive free medical insurance and a yearly "allowance" of between $20,000 and $26,000 for living expenses.

This happens for a few reasons:

1) The National Institutes of Health and the government are very interested in training physician scientists. In theory, we are the people who are conducting research that will directly help patients, improve the healthcare system, and save them money in the long run.

2) MD/PhDs are in school for MUCH longer than MDs, and they usually make less money once they are out of school. Therefore, it would be hard to convince people to take that route if it required racking up substantial debt, and being less able to pay it off.

3) PhD programs are almost always fully funded, so many people believe that dual degree programs involving a PhD should be also.

Sadly, the fact that MD/PhDs get paid to go through graduate school means that some people try to enter the programs even if they hate research solely because they want the money.

I have a question. How many years does it take? I know this is a stupid question but I am just curious.

Also, you say that tuition is waived (I guess that means "free"). Correct me if I am wrong but don't you go to graduate school to get a masters and/or PhD? Is that payed for too, I'm just a bit confused.

 

[tennisball80]

do many physicians do this or are they all reasearchers?

I also heard the MD/PhD's get receive free tuition and living expenses for 7 years.

 

[MilkmanAl]

Most MD/PhD programs in the United States are funded, either by the schools or by the National Institutes of Health. This means that most MD/PhD students have their medical tuition waived AND they receive free medical insurance and a yearly "allowance" of between $20,000 and $26,000 for living expenses.

🙂

 

[tennisball80]

🙂

Yea my previous post was useless. Someone posted MD/PhD is "free" alreayd 😛

 

[Law2Doc]

I also heard the MD/PhD's get receive free tuition and living expenses for 7 years.

They receive a stipend. But they end up spending many more years in school rather than getting out into the work force much sooner, so looking at it from a longterm perspective, they come out behind financially. You don't do this for the money, you do this because you have a career path in mind for which a dual degree is advantageous.

 

[Law2Doc]

This may sound silly but I have a list of goals and getting a PhD is one.

This is not an appropriate way to choose a career path. You only get a PhD if it is advantageous for the career you hope to have. You don't get it for "personal reasons" or preconceived "list of goals" you make in high school. What you ought to be doing is figure out what you see yourself doing career-wise, and then "connect the dots" to get there. No point doing this in high school -- you can start formulating your game plan in college once you have been exposed to more things and know your options, likes and dislikes a bit better. But I have to agree it is kind of "silly" to feel like you have personal reasons and a list of goals you want to accomplish and so that necessitates you getting an advanced graduate degree that perhaps you have no need for in your career. Once you can articulate a career path you think you want, then maybe that's different. But as long as it's listed as a "goal" and not a means to a more specific goal, or it's a personal reason you can't articulate publicly, then no, it's a really bad idea. A few years from now you will understand what I'm talking about. Good luck.

 

[smq123]

I have a question. How many years does it take? I know this is a stupid question but I am just curious.

I also heard the MD/PhD's get receive free tuition and living expenses for 7 years.

No, actually, this is NOT a stupid question.

The traditional answer is that it takes 7-8 years. (4 for the MD, and 3-4 for the PhD - you do 2 years of MD school, then 3-4 years to get your PhD, and then finish the last 2 years of MD school.)

The actual answer is that it takes as long as you need to get finished. For some people who have a hard time finding a PhD thesis project that works, it can take up to 10 years. [Think about that - by the time you're starting your internship, your fellow first year med school classmates will be attendings by then!]

There are lots of good reasons to do an MD/PhD. But just having a "goal" of "having a PhD" is not one of them.

The Moderator for the MD/PhD (Physician-Scientist) forum wrote a blog entry that addresses these questions.

Just how long is an MD/PhD program anyway?

Hope you find it useful. 🙂

 

[smq123]

This may sound silly but I have a list of goals and getting a PhD is one.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine who is in graduate school and is almost done getting a PhD. His answer was: ""Go punch yourself in the face. It has the same effect and is a lot faster."

So really - put a lot of thought and energy into considering this whole MD/PhD thing. It's not as glamorous as it sounds.

 

[Neuronix]

If you're really interested in MD/PhD I recommend the MD/PhD forum and many resources to read and find out what you are asking about. You should have a good sense of what a MD/PhD entails and is for before asking lots of questions.

Start with what the officials have to say: http://www.aamc.org/research/dbr/mdphd/
and go with what the students have to say: http://www.mdphds.org/
http://forums.studentdoctor.net/forumdisplay.php?f=32

The MD/PhD forum is here. You don't have to just sit in hSDN. If you really want to do MD/PhD or get more information it's there. There's several sticky threads with a ton of information and with a search you'll probably find the answers to most questions you'd want to ask.

do many physicians do this or are they all reasearchers?

4% of all medical students nationally are MD/PhDs. On the order of >95% of those will go on to do residency. In the sense of being licensed physicians, you can therefore say the vast majority will become physicians. The real question is how the MD/PhD faculty spends their time. As a MD/PhD student or interested student you will mostly be exposed to MD/PhD faculty who are living the goal of the MD/PhD program. That is: those faculty who have made their lives primarily about research.

Let me say that again: the goal of the MD/PhD program is to produce majority researchers. It's one of the few goals that really make sense. You can argue about the usefulness of the PhD to make a good administrator or device engineer as well for example, but this is not the goal of the vast majority of MD/PhD programs. The NIH funds some of these programs, though the school kicks in the majority of the funding at even these programs. Both have a pretty unified sense of making basic science researchers, though a few programs are branched into other areas of science.

Of course the reality is that on the order of 30% of MD/PhD graduates will spend most of their time doing research after residency, but that's another issue.

"Go punch yourself in the face. It has the same effect and is a lot faster."

This is true if the only reason you're getting that PhD is for a personal goal. You know what I did today? I went skydiving for the first time. $200 down the drain. That was a personal goal. It was an hour car ride, a short video, a guy behind me, up in the plane, and out. That's the kind of personal goal you put on a checklist. PhD is a lot of hard work. Science is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. The dropout rate from graduate school is high for a reason.

So if you are obsessed with research as I was, go ahead and do it. I would disagree with Law2Doc that you need to have life figured out before you make the decision to attend a program. I never did know what I wanted to do with life and I still don't. This is probably why I'm taking the next year off to persue adventure sports. One of these days I'll probably get around to writing a novel.

But one thing I did know was that I wanted to make research a part of my career. I'm not sure of that now, but I knew it at the time. You know what turned me off? Graduate school. If you don't have a ridiculous desire to do research you'll leave grad school and will have wasted your own and everyone else's time. You lose money on the long run financially as has already been pointed out since you spend 4 years in grad school, so there's never any reason to stay. If anything, MD/PhDs tend NOT to go into the high paying specialties and private practice, so you lose money there too. Only a strange type of MD/PhD fanatacism powers a MD/PhD through both degrees. Anything else is a waste of your time and your program's time.

To put it another way:
Med school tuition + stipend = $70k/year x 4 years
1 year in Radiology private practice to start = $250k MINIMUM (and easily double that)

Do the math. It's not worth the money based on personal finance. MD/PhD programs are 8 years +/- 1 year. If you graduate in 7 that's nice. You are just as likely to graduate in 9. Given the upward trend in graduation times the national average might be 9 by the time you start.

Anyhow, you're in high school. You have years to think about it. MD/PhD is even more competitive than standard MD school. If you spend your years of undergrad getting a near 4.0 GPA, doing years of basic science research, and then pull a 95th percentile or more on the MCAT, let's talk again. With that level of commitment, by then you'll have figured out why you want to do this or you'll be off this MD/PhD trail.

 

[xnfs93hy]

If I may, let me just throw my question out there as well.

I have heard that some people who cannot get into an Allopathic medical school go for the D.O's and sometimes get accepted or sometimes people just go across seas, the former I assume would be more practical than the latter, going to another country is a bit of a stretch. I have also heard from some people that many D.O's go into Family practice instead of the competitive specialties and that it is very hard to get into a competitive specialty with a D.O instead of an M.D degree.

If I could get into a D.O/P.hD program right out of undergrad and do very well, would I be an attractive candidate? Or is it just unheard of for a D.O to get into a competitive residency?

Also If I do get into a D.O/P.hD, do I get free tuition?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Neuronix]

I have heard that some people who cannot get into an Allopathic medical school go for the D.O's and sometimes get accepted or sometimes people just go across seas, the former I assume would be more practical than the latter, going to another country is a bit of a stretch. I have also heard from some people that many D.O's go into Family practice instead of the competitive specialties and that it is very hard to get into a competitive specialty with a D.O instead of an M.D degree.

To a rough approximation this is pretty much true. Though the Caribbean medical schools are tailored towards Americans who couldn't get into allopathic schools, and makes the foreign country bit easier through partnerships with American schools. DO vs. Caribbean has been an SDN holy war forever and the answer of which to do if you are unable to do allopathic but want to be a physician is subjective.

DOs are typically the last pick for allopathic residencies. There are residencies in competitive non-primary care specialties for DO students but they are rare. Most DO programs tailor themselves to be primary care schools. So you can get a competitive residency out of a DO program but you have to be a top DO student.

If I could get into a D.O/P.hD program right out of undergrad and do very well, would I be an attractive candidate? Or is it just unheard of for a D.O to get into a competitive residency?

DO/PhD programs are very rare and very small. I do not know the answer to your question because there are so few out there.

Also If I do get into a D.O/P.hD, do I get free tuition?

As far as I am aware no DO/PhD program is fully-funded. That is, no program offers free tuition and stipend for all years of the program. I don't know if any are partially funded, but most spots would be unfunded. There are MD/PhD programs which are also not funded. What this means is that the PhD is free and you are given a stipend while you do the PhD. But, you will still owe the full price for your MD studies and not receive any cost of living money during those years. This makes the loans even worse as $120k or whatever from your first two years of medical school will add interest while you do your PhD.

These unfunded or partially funded programs are generally just as competitive as the lower-tier MD or DO programs that host them.

A PhD is not a ticket into a more competitive specialty. You still have to be a solid medical student to get those spots and in many competitive specialties they don't care about your PhD, putting you on equal footing with everyone else.

The resources available for training PhDs are there to train students who will become researchers and benefit society in part by making less money for themselves someday. The idea of taking a PhD just to get medical school paid for is ridiculous, AGAIN because you lose money int he long run. Also because if your heart is not in it the PhD is a brutal curse onto yourself.

 

[Depakote]

I explored DO/PhD briefly.

The number and size of programs were definitely small, but the ones I looked at, you applied during your 2nd year of DO school after doing research during your 1st year summer.

There might have been some funding for the PhD years (mainly internal scholarships), it was a while ago I forget the specifics.

 

[Neuronix]

There might have been some funding for the PhD years (mainly internal scholarships), it was a while ago I forget the specifics.

Any PhD program in biomedical sciences will fund you on the order of the low to mid 20k/year. You are essentially an apprentice and you spend most of the time doing science. The formal classroom teaching you receive is typically minimal and not of the same quality as undergraduate instruction, and you may have to teach undergrads as a part of supporting your stipend. The science you do contributes to the fund of knowledge applied for by a grant and enriches (i.e. is then used to later apply for money) the department. Hence, as a grad student you are more like an employee, are somewhat valuable, and thus get your small share of the pot. The money you're paid comes from your principal investigator's grants, training grants, and departmental grants. Competition for most biomedical sciences graduate school spots is low, so you are almost always guaranteed to get a PhD if you want one. Even MD programs will typically let a student do a PhD at their own school or elsewhere.

The difficulty is always getting the MD paid for. This is only at "fully funded" MD/PhD programs (which is most). No DO/PhD programs are fully funded.

 

[QofQuimica]

I did a PhD first and then went to medical school (currently in my third year). I have to agree with the other posters--you do not get a PhD just for the fun of it! You have to really love science and research to go down this path. But don't worry if you're not sure what you want to do yet. A lot of people who like science have a hard time deciding between MD vs. PhD. When you get to college (or even now, if you have time and the opportunity), you should get involved in activities that will help you decide how you feel about science and medicine. For example, try working in a lab for a semester or year. Try shadowing some physicians. Contact some MD/PhDs and talk to them about what they do. One of my inspirations for going to med school after my PhD was a fellow PhD-to-MD with whom I worked while I was in grad school. He got his PhD in pharmacology, then went to med school and became an anesthesiologist. Now he does very cool pain research of a type that would be difficult for a PhD to do. But the PhD training gave him a unique perspective that he would not have had if he had only gotten an MD. I think MD/PhD is a terrific training path, at least for a certain group of people who really want to do medically-oriented research. Most others probably shouldn't bother, and especially if money is their main motivation. This is a very tough way to make a lot of money. 😉

 

[Neuronix]

This is a very tough way to make a lot of money. 😉

I like what you wrote Q. I just want to emphasize for the masses this is a tougher way to make LESS money. Your yearly earnings does not increase by doing the PhD. If anything academic positions where MD/PhD is geared make less than private practice positions where MD is geared. You will make the same money as your peers who studied for less years or even make less money by taking lower paid research jobs as opposed to clinical jobs. The PhD is not a pathway to consider if you want to make money. The training alone will cost you on the order of $1 million dollars or more in lost earnings over the course of a lifetime by my previous analysis and you will not earn this back.

 

[Schlockinz]

The training alone will cost you on the order of $1 million dollars or more in lost earnings over the course of a lifetime by my previous analysis and you will not earn this back.

You could potentially with the right sort of patent, but not many people have patents to their name, and even fewer patents make money. If you did patent a product or process and started a spin off company, then you could make up the money, but once again the people who do this are few and far between.

Do not get a PhD if you want to have a high earning potential, its just not there.