PT, PA, or Med school?

[hes0123]

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I am currently a senior in undergrad, and I have been pursuing physical therapy. I have been accepted into PT school for the following year, but I am starting to have doubts if this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I have always loved health care, and I love trying to solve puzzles and figure things out. I feel that as a PA or a medical doctor I would do more diagnosing than as a PT. Has anyone else gone through this struggle? How did you decide which to choose?

I am also wondering about my chances of getting into either PA or med school.
I think PA translates more since I have almost all of the prereqs and have taken the GRE.

I have a 3.95 GPA but my GRE is 302 combined. Would my GPA balance out my GRE or would I need to retake it to get into PA school?

Thank you for your time.

 

[pamac]

The previous post above this is filled with good insight. You would have been well served if you had shadowed each of the professions you listed, or worked around them in a minor healthcare role to see what they do in a typical day.

Some of the hardest puzzles to solve in the healthcare field aren’t always related to isolating exactly what is affecting your patient... it’s often the quandary of getting them to comply with the course of action that solid evidence indicates would help them the most. Yes, you may find yourself wagering how much your patient’s blood pressure will drop with a particular medication vs published guidelines, or trying to figure out how your patient can have a negative benzo drug screen despite the record showing that staff are giving him 3 doses of benzo per shift (answers to the last one include: the staff are either stealing it, or the patient is spitting it out and saving it up... prison nursing setting). But a lot of your deductive reasoning will be figuring out things like “this patient’s insurance won’t cover this, what is an alternative that they will actually do”, or “this patient doesn’t have the motivation to do what it takes to go to sleep on time and not use a pill to go to sleep”, or any other non sexy detective work you can imagine. And of course, with time, solving those kinds of mind puzzles begin to seem futile, so you are left with looking for ways to placate your sense of duty and invest in a mindset that understands that presenting the best advice you can is all you can do sometimes.

The best thing to do since you are nearing a crossroad is to talk to as many PT’s, PAs and physicians as you can and get exposure to the fields. Ask a million questions, visit message boards and see what things they complain about to each other, and get a feel for how you think you would handle as much training as it will take to get to each of those careers. I though physicians had it made until I worked alongside them as a nurse and realized that for the ones I was working around, my day had more downtime than theirs. Most of them were like sharks... if they quit swimming they drown. Most of them that I know take call and get interruptions in the middle of the night. Physicians and PAs can make the kind of mistakes that can cost a life and their career. If it was just solving puzzles, I think more of them would be happier than they are.