God bless ya, brother, but I think the odds of winning Powerball would be greater for a D.O. than landing ortho and derm after the merger. Lots of ortho DO programs are not going to survive the accreditation process. I would predict 60%+ of all ortho programs will disappear. Ugly truth.
As an older non-trad student I would keep an open mind as you progress through school and you'd be suprised what you get interested in. I knew lots of one-track minded guys who started out as "ortho brohs" in MS1 and ended up matching into FM, ER, and even peds!
As a nontraditional student (second career), who went DO, matched ortho in the first residency class and now have gone through the ACGME accreditation process (myself and co chief did the majority of the paperwork) I think I'm uniquely suited to answer many of these questions.
To claim 60% of programs will disappear is (1) purely subjective based on NO information but just an opinion of a PRE-medical student (at least thats what it says under his/her name) and (2) absolutely ludicrous. How do I know? Because I know personally what the issues are holding back many of the programs from accreditation as we spoke to many programs discussing areas that they passed but we were cited as issues. For the majority of programs mostly its "paperwork" (wrong PLAs, lack of formal educational objectives for each rotation, faculty associated research, etc). These are ALL correctable issues. So, my personal projection is a loss of 5-10. Thank goodness we just got accredited, its been good for our program as a whole, but will be tough to maintain.
However, as others have stated DO ortho spots are being farmed out to the NRMP match. We recently had a meeting this week where we were placed under pressure by our governing board to select at least one spot for the NRMP match (until the merger we have to designate how many spots we want for the DO match and how many for the MD match), so as to not look "prejudice" against MD.. my eyes rolled heavy on that one.
So I would agree that as a whole DO ortho spots are being lost. Our program director's mantra is that we are first an osteopathic training program, but the outside pressure is making it hard to stay that way.
I'll echo what others have stated as well. You definitely can go into medical school with a "bias" on what specialty you may want, but have an open mind. Really first determine if you want to be a doctor (the nature of medicine has changed so much and if you havent spent months shadowing doctors or working with them you are going to be really surprised) and in your first 1-2 years KILL all the classes, as if you are going ortho, do some good research during the summer time (this is NOT hard, no matter what people say. I've got plenty of projects I could put you to work on. You just need to be a little creative) and reassess your goals end of your second year.
I was 100% peds going into med school and ended up ortho. Quite a switch.
Then which ever school you end up going, find the connections during your third and fourth year that will give you a leg up among the other students.
If you want to do Ortho, I cant recommend either MD or DO school as both routes are so extremely tough. As others have argued numbers, stats, amount of applicants,etc -- I dont really care about that. To me thats putting the cart before the donkey because for both schools DO/MD you need to be top of your game. If you are, you'll match. If you are middle road then you'll struggle on either end and you'll have to end up relying on the odds. So bottom line, instead of arguing which school its easier to match ortho just promise yourself you'll be the best and put in the time to do it. I know others will disagree, stating why not find the spot that makes it the easiest, etc, etc. . I just dont see life like that. The chips fell for me, I ended up in a DO program, and I put forth the effort to match an ortho residency PERIOD. OP, you can as well. feel free to PM me and we can chat anytime.
He named the programs ... and either way it’s true. I have non SDN sources that have confirmed it. UW, UNM, and LSU I believe.
