Is it possible to finish medical school but not attain a residency, essentially wasting 4 years of intense schooling?
Residency
- Thread starter LMM814
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Yes. However if you don't directly match there is a scramble where you can get a residency. Though even then people have failed to get residencies ( I think ~10 people failed to get them this year). However some people who want to get into competitive residencies have failed to match the first time and then applied another round.
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Just do one while you're in medical school. Problem solved.
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Holy ****, someone actually posted that in their facebook? I don't know what I hope for more, for this idiot to get into med school and get reamed or to not get into med school because they got creamed during interviews over this viewpoint.
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There's a whole thread about this facebook post.
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yeah, I just saw.... bewildering ... even a double facepalm cannot give this girl justice.
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There are many reason's why you should never ever tell anyone you're pre-med. This girl is one of the reasons, everyone and their grandmother is a pre-med.
There are rare cases of people who go into non-clinical positions straight out of medical school like consulting or the pharmaceutical industry.
I guess you could also theoretically pass all 3 steps of the USMLE and get a license and open your own general practice. The problem is that without completing a residency you would not be able to get clinical priviliges at any hospital (and maybe couldn't get paid by insurance cos or medicare either?). This sort of thing was done more commonly 50+ years ago but not anymore. There's just too much stuff to know, and most of the practical knowledge is learned in residency, not in med school.
I guess you could also theoretically pass all 3 steps of the USMLE and get a license and open your own general practice. The problem is that without completing a residency you would not be able to get clinical priviliges at any hospital (and maybe couldn't get paid by insurance cos or medicare either?). This sort of thing was done more commonly 50+ years ago but not anymore. There's just too much stuff to know, and most of the practical knowledge is learned in residency, not in med school.
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Don't you take step 3 during your residency? Anyways having your own practice is more of a thing about money. You could own a successful practice or even a hospital without a college degree even. It's all about having the money to buy those things and then higher a bunch of doctors.
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You may be obliged to complete a year of residency or an internship before you can take the Step III, depending on your state. Without passing it, you can't get a license to practice medicine independently.
Twenty-one states require that you complete one-year post-graduate residency training. Seven states require that you complete at least 6 months of residency. And 22 states have no residency training requirement to apply to take the Step III. State specific information is here: http://www.fsmb.org/usmle_requirementschart.html
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Yes, it's possible. It can be deliberate: Some choose to do a year of research to become more competitive for certain residency programs. Others might take a year off after med school to have a child. But it can also happen without it being a choice, eg, some don't match and fail to scramble into an open spot. But they can try again the next year.
I'm fairly sure that Step 3 just has to be taken after med school graduation, I don't think you have to be in a residency. I could be wrong though, it's been a few years since I took it.
What you say above about medical practices is theoretically possible (i.e. a random person opening a practice and hiring docs) but doesn't really happen in the real world.
Traditional medical practices ("private practices") have always been owned jointly by the doctors in the practice. In the case of a solo practice, then, there would only be one owner. Individual docs in the practice get a certain percentage of their billings and the rest is split up to cover the costs of the practice and then shared among all the partners (I'm oversimplifying a lot, I'm sure).
Academic medical center and large hospital systems (i.e. Kaiser, etc) work differently. These places employ physicians and pay them a fixed salary (though usually there are salary bonuses based on productivity).
The trend in American medicine over the past 2 decades has been a shift away from traditional private practice to salaried physicians. With the new health care reform, I expect this shift to continue if not accelerate. Like with most changes, there's some good and some bad involved.
