Would you mind explaining the universal resistance against listing high school clinical experience? Is it because the person who did it probably put it on their undergrad university application, so ADCOMS see it as double dipping?
For the life of me, I don’t understand why having done an activity during high school makes it unvalidated?
There's no rule against it, but it's frowned upon for several reasons.
First, if you really want to be a doctor, you should have done enough in the 3-4 years before applying that you don't have space or the need to fall back on high school activities.
Second, high school stuff happened a long time ago, relatively speaking. That raises a question: how far back
should adcoms consider your ECs? If I decided to switch careers into medicine in my early 40s, should adcoms consider my high school activities? Or should I be listing stuff I did twenty years earlier as an undergrad? There has to be some kind of temporal cutoff beyond which your experiences aren't meaningful application-builders. For many adcoms, that cutoff is about 3-4 years.
Third, high schoolers are at greater risk for participating in certain activities because of parental pressure. College-aged people are more likely to participate of their own volition, which makes the activities meaningful.
Fourth, if you want adcoms to consider your high school ECs, then they should also get to weigh your high school GPA. It's only fair. (OK, I was joking on that last point.) (Maybe.)
As a caveat, it's perfectly fair to discuss your high school activities in your personal statement as part of your "How I Chose Medicine" spiel, and unique activities from high school may be worth including if they were continued through college. But most high school activities don't impress adcoms, so you're just wasting valuable application space when you include them.
Also, the word is "invalid".
