Should I mention that I have Polycystic ovary syndrome(PCO) in my application?

This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.

m25

Full Member
7+ Year Member
Joined
May 28, 2014
Messages
304
Reaction score
20
I started experiencing PCO right when I started college. Having PCO made me feel constantly tired, miserable, and depressed throughout all my college years(which I barely made with gpa of 3.5, with downward slope as my PCO symptoms got progressively worse) but I finally got diagnosed with PCO after graduating and started receiving the right treatments and is feeling much better now. This is when I finally realized that most of the days that I skipped classes in college because I was feeling too depressed or low on energy was probably due to PCO.
The question is, should I mention this in my application? As some of you know, PCO is not entirely curable disease and will probably persist for life despite the improved symptoms. Would medical school view applicant with this disease as a negative thing? I don't want to use PCO as an excuse to how poorly I did in college, but is this something I should still disclose, as it did play a major role in my life(with mostly negative impacts though)? Also, because I don't have enough time and the money to take more classes and prove that I can do better than a 3.5, I plan to score really well on the MCAT. (im scoring in the top 88% percentile in practice tests now).
Any advice is appreciated!

Members don't see this ad.
 
No.
Unless this is the primary reason for your decision, it is neither desirable nor necessary to go into detail regarding your personal medical history.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
You don't have to explain the 3.5. Any med school that will give you an interview invite knows you got a 3.5. They feel you could potentially succeed despite it.


I feel like adcoms would be incredulous if you said "I got a 3.5 because of PCOS". The idiom "No johns" comes to mind.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
This will only come off as an excuse, no matter how it's put. Let your app do your talking for you.


I started experiencing PCO right when I started college. Having PCO made me feel constantly tired, miserable, and depressed throughout all my college years(which I barely made with gpa of 3.5, with downward slope as my PCO symptoms got progressively worse) but I finally got diagnosed with PCO after graduating and started receiving the right treatments and is feeling much better now.
 
I know a doctor with PCOS, and she manages...in case you were worried about that

I don't think medical school cares if you have PCOS, and it would probably come off as an excuse.
 
Really bad idea to mention it. If an OB/Gyn were to happen to read your app you'd be dead in the water trying to use PCOS as excuse for anything besides being infertile.
?
OB/Gyns probably know better than most doctors how debilitating PCOS can be.

Not saying she should discuss it, but that was an odd thing to say.
 
Only if you can work it into your reasons for wanting to be a doctor. You could potentially include it to highlight how your perspective as a patient will influence your abilities as a physician. As it sounds right now, though, you're mosly using it as an explanation for a somewhat mediocre GPA, and in that context I'd leave it out.
 
?
OB/Gyns probably know better than most doctors how debilitating PCOS can be.

Not saying she should discuss it, but that was an odd thing to say.

I may have worded it a bit too bluntly, but if I had to rattle off a list of debilitating conditions, PCOS would be very far down on the list. It is a fairly prevalent syndrome -some estimate that 1 in 12 women has some form of it- and "feeling tired and miserable" is not how it presents 99.9999% of the time. So no, most OB/Gyn's would not read that personal statement with sympathy. I mean, we are all heinous to start with, and besides that we have all our experiences with perfectly normally functioning PCOS patients to draw upon. I'm not saying OP's symptoms weren't real, and that she doesn't have PCOS, but it seems more coincidental than causative of her school issues.
 
Edit: Not worth defending...
 
Last edited:
PCOS is not just weight gain and hair growth. The hormone imbalances also cause mood swings, and these can be severe and debilitating in FAR more than 0.0001% of women with PCOS - particularly when it's untreated. "Tired and miserable" is a understated description of my own experience with untreated PCOS. I was also in constant pain due to hidradenitis suppurativa caused by the hormone imbalances.

Would an untreated mood disorder or chronic pain seem potentially causative of bad grades to you? What about the two of them together?


Edit: I know I'm going to get excoriated for this post because of the vast education differential between us, but your statement is just so far out of left field for me given my interactions with gynecologists and other women with PCOS. My point was that the experience OP describes is very plausible, even if most women with PCOS may not have the same severity of symptoms.

Edit: Took out the umbrage.
You're joking right? You must not realize that @22301 alum is an attending Ob/GYN, right? She has seen a multitude of patients with PCOS before and gets paid to treat them. I am not sure who you are to judge what field her response is in or not. Clearly she understands how the typical patient deals with PCOS.

I am not in that field but even I know one thing most women with PCOS share in common that could make then feel tired and lazy, like being obese. Look, we all have our burdens but there is something you have to realize. If OP gets into medical school her PCOS isn't going to magically go away. It could breakthrough, even with medication. Is that going to make her performance slide like it did before? What about during residency? Because during residency none of her coresidents are going to give a damn if her PCOS is making her tired. This is why making excuses on an app should only be for extreme things.
 
Last edited:
You're joking right? You must not realize that @22301 alum is an attending Ob/GYN, right? She has seen a multitude of patients with PCOS before and gets paid to treat them. I am not sure who you are to judge what field her response is in or not. Clearly she understands how the typical patient deals with PCOS.
I know she is an OB/Gyn, and it bothered me that an OB/Gyn would claim that virtually no women with PCOS feel "tired and miserable" given how common mood issues are with PCOS. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24816764
I'm very surprised that she doesn't see this in her own practice. That's the last thing I'm going to say about this...

This is why making excuses on an app should only be for extreme things.
I never said that the OP should use this as an excuse in her app. I said the opposite.
 
Last edited:
I know she is an OB/Gyn, and it bothered me that an OB/Gyn would claim that virtually no women with PCOS feel "tired and miserable" given how common mood issues are with PCOS. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24816764
I'm very surprised that she doesn't see this in her own practice. That's the last thing I'm going to say about this...


I never said that the OP should use this as an excuse in her app. I said the opposite.

You linked to a cohort study about patients with CO-MORBID mood conditions along with PCOS. If OP wants to talk about the depression, she also happened to have, fine.
 
I had PCOS before I transitioned, and it was pretty terrible. I was really delighted to find that testosterone injections basically cured the problem. Did come with a few side effects, like becoming a guy, so probably not a first line treatment.

Point is, as awful as it was, it wasn't a good reason not to succeed at the things that I wanted to achieve. There are people out there with much more profound physical and mental impairments who somehow manage to do what needs to be done. In fact, I'd say that almost everyone has some cross to bear. Everyone has something that could have held them back if they let it. Often, it is something invisible, like PCOS, or depression, or childhood traumas. Pointing out your personal problems and saying that they are the reason you didn't do so well is frowned upon, because not only does it looks like making excuses, but because so many others might have the same issue and yet managed to do what you did not.

I worked with a CRNA who had one arm. He mostly just did a lot of things one handed with exceptional dexterity, but he did have a prosthesis that he put on for intubating. Some of the attendings who trained him actually put even more pressure on him than they did on folks with both hands to work with... not because they were being jerks for the sake of it, but so that he would be forced to build his skills to the point that he could handle anything that came his way with confidence. Real patients in distress don't get easier to manage just because you have limitations yourself.

PCOS may have really made life difficult for you, but that isn't the story that adcoms want to hear. They have piles of applications from people who aren't going to talk about why they didn't do better. They only need to hear why you are passionate about becoming a physician, and how you can demonstrate that you are going to succeed in achieving your dreams. If your PCOS experiences are part of the reason you want to become a doctor, then talk about that. Otherwise, it should never be mentioned. You don't have enough space to address the things you do need to say, let alone distracting tangents.
 
Living with an undiagnosed medical condition, particularly one with vague symptoms that can easily (and far too often are) written off as 'fat / lazy / hormonal' is a very difficult and aggravating experience. As you and many others (particularly women) know, it sucks!

That said, from the "this is why I didn't perform well" angle, it won't play well. Think of all the 'sympathy' you got pre-diagnosis and translate into "excuse mode". So it won't help you.

But from the perspective of having experienced what it's like to be a patient living with an undiagnosed medical condition with vague and somewhat debilitating symptoms that isn't always taken seriously -- that's a different story. How that experience will (you hope) make you a more compassionate physician is a story you may want to tell. Just be careful how you tell it. No one wants to hear the profession bad-mouthed...
 
I had PCOS before I transitioned, and it was pretty terrible. I was really delighted to find that testosterone injections basically cured the problem. Did come with a few side effects, like becoming a guy, so probably not a first line treatment.

Point is, as awful as it was, it wasn't a good reason not to succeed at the things that I wanted to achieve. There are people out there with much more profound physical and mental impairments who somehow manage to do what needs to be done. In fact, I'd say that almost everyone has some cross to bear. Everyone has something that could have held them back if they let it. Often, it is something invisible, like PCOS, or depression, or childhood traumas. Pointing out your personal problems and saying that they are the reason you didn't do so well is frowned upon, because not only does it looks like making excuses, but because so many others might have the same issue and yet managed to do what you did not.

I worked with a CRNA who had one arm. He mostly just did a lot of things one handed with exceptional dexterity, but he did have a prosthesis that he put on for intubating. Some of the attendings who trained him actually put even more pressure on him than they did on folks with both hands to work with... not because they were being jerks for the sake of it, but so that he would be forced to build his skills to the point that he could handle anything that came his way with confidence. Real patients in distress don't get easier to manage just because you have limitations yourself.

PCOS may have really made life difficult for you, but that isn't the story that adcoms want to hear. They have piles of applications from people who aren't going to talk about why they didn't do better. They only need to hear why you are passionate about becoming a physician, and how you can demonstrate that you are going to succeed in achieving your dreams. If your PCOS experiences are part of the reason you want to become a doctor, then talk about that. Otherwise, it should never be mentioned. You don't have enough space to address the things you do need to say, let alone distracting tangents.

This is an exceptionally awesome post.
 
I started experiencing PCO right when I started college. Having PCO made me feel constantly tired, miserable, and depressed throughout all my college years(which I barely made with gpa of 3.5, with downward slope as my PCO symptoms got progressively worse) but I finally got diagnosed with PCO after graduating and started receiving the right treatments and is feeling much better now. This is when I finally realized that most of the days that I skipped classes in college because I was feeling too depressed or low on energy was probably due to PCO.
The question is, should I mention this in my application? As some of you know, PCO is not entirely curable disease and will probably persist for life despite the improved symptoms. Would medical school view applicant with this disease as a negative thing? I don't want to use PCO as an excuse to how poorly I did in college, but is this something I should still disclose, as it did play a major role in my life(with mostly negative impacts though)? Also, because I don't have enough time and the money to take more classes and prove that I can do better than a 3.5, I plan to score really well on the MCAT. (im scoring in the top 88% percentile in practice tests now).
Any advice is appreciated!
Definitely not - and I doubt your PCOS is related to your performance.

I have PCOS and so does 5-15% of females. It's the leash cause of infertility. It really doesn't set you apart - and you just sound like a whinny pre med student.

I didn't use any prescription but managed my PCOS - took me a few years to get it right. Pam me if you want to talk.
 
I had PCOS before I transitioned, and it was pretty terrible. I was really delighted to find that testosterone injections basically cured the problem. Did come with a few side effects, like becoming a guy, so probably not a first line treatment.

I agree with everything he said, plus I also had PCOS before I transitioned. They thought I was never going to have kids because of it, guess who ended up with a surprise baby. And yea testosterone cream does help.

Don't use your PCOS as an excuse. I don't even use my epilepsy as an excuse and I was uncontrolled during undergrad and was having multiple seizures daily causing a way lower GPA than a 3.5. I had to do a post-bacc for years to get it up to a 3.5.
 
Top