EMH said:
Thank you for the good posts here most of you. Sorry I stired up all this agression.
There have been some decent answers on here, but one thing I wanted to comment on that may come up when you talk to allopathic students...
"DO's don't match as well as MD's."
Yes and no.
The statistics are obviously skewed because the number of DO schools and the number of MD schools are so different. Let's say you have 25 DO schools and 125 MD schools... this suggests that for every residency position, there will be 5 MD students for every 1 DO student. Therefore, it makes plenty of sense that MD students "match better" than DO students... there are more allopathic candidates! To offset this, you have the osteopathic residencies that are only open to DO students -- although I never seem to see anything on SDN by a DO student adamant about matching at an osteopathic residency.
The word on the street is that DO and MD are considered equals, but some residency PD's seem to feel that, all other things (research, LOR's) being roughly equal, DO applicants should really have a higher USMLE score than MD applicants. So obviously things are not entirely equal. For instance, I have heard that the University of Maryland is not DO-friendly.
The good news is that the word is also that DO-unfriendliness is diminishing AND if you look at the matches, you'll see DO students matching at places like Yale, Hopkins, Darmouth, NYU, Mayo, etc. Sure, no MGH but that's hard to match into even if you go to an MD school and I don't think anyone is crying in their beer over not matching at the University of Maryland.
Personally, if I become a DO student, and I'd love to be a DO student, I would definitely apply to the allopathic match as well as the osteopathic match. I would love to do a residency at a place like Dartmouth because one, I know they have good training there (scutwork.com) and secondly, I believe the name value would help me get into a respectable group practice after residency.
I don't imagine myself having to explain about the training at Dartmouth the way I might have to if I matched at a small community hospital affiliated with, say, COMP. But training is training and aptitude with clinical procedures would definitely go further than mediocre results and a shiny name.
Anyway, something to think about. Correct me if I'm wrong on any of this.