Religious affiliations?

[mikkey]

Hey
What does it change for a medical school to be religiously affiliated, like Loma Linda and Creighton? Does your medical education vary from any other school, because they won't teach things like abortion, for example?

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[Law2Doc]

Hey
What does it change for a medical school to be religiously affiliated, like Loma Linda and Creighton? Does your medical education vary from any other school, because they won't teach things like abortion, for example?

Here's my take. (Coming from someone not at one of these schools). They probably give more lip service to things like "intelligent design" in the first couple of years, but otherwise nothing will be different, except for getting different holidays off. Certain sexual orientations may not feel accepted at religious schools (there were some threads on issues at a NY school last year).
In your OB rotation there perhaps may be some opportunity to learn abortion procedure, but you can decline, and since most people get abortions at clinics as opposed to teaching hospitals, the number of abortions you would be exposed to at a nonreligious school would be limited anyhow. There isn't formal abortion teaching in med school anyhow, so it's not like the curricula will differ. Things like in vitro fertilization and stem cell research probably wouldn't be found at religious school hospitals, but again, you'd need to seek those opportunities out -- they aren't part of the standard med school curricula.
At its heart, med schools are med schools.

 

[Tired Pigeon]

I believe you are supposed to make some sort of pledge to adhere to SDA tenets in your private life if you are attending Loma Linda (no alcohol, observing the Sabbath, etc.). No idea to what extent this could be/is enforced, though.

 

[DoctaJay]

It can't truly be enforced unless you do something crazy that ends up on the news; then you'll probably come up on their radar. But yeah, you just won't be able to find anything open on campus on the Sabbath, and you won't find any alcohol on campus, and their probably will be very few places where you can find coffee on campus also (although I heard that the hospital has some hidden away somewhere ). Overally, like Law2Doc said, your education won't be altered at all. I would put my neck out and say that LLU is the only openly religious medical school with the Creighton, and Georgetown not really flashing their Jesuit origins too much. I could be wrong though.