It's amazing to me that so many people get so worked up over the MD/DO thing. As a first year DO student neck deep in anatomy, I can tell you that the differences b/t the two are very small, with the exception of OMM.
I would be in favor of allowing any MD student who trained in OMM (say by taking CE's or summer classes) to rotate and match at DO hospitals. Why not? I think it's only fair to expect some reciprocity. It's very hypocritical to expect MD's to take DO's but not vice versa.
I would like to take this opportunity to point out some glaring inconsistancies in the MD/DO argument though:
1. We all take the same classes (DO's add on OMM).
2. Most people (although it has been pointed out here) don't know that the much respected Goljan teaches at a DO school. Are his students inferior? I don't think so.
3. There are some MD schools that were formerlly DO schools. There are also MD schools where students take classes with DO's. There are also MD schools where MD's and DO's spend 3rd and 4th year rotating in the exact same wards.
4. We are all taught by the same teachers. My current anatomy professor has taught for 30 years at a variety of well respected MD schools. The same is true of many DO and MD schools. There's alot of incest in academia and there just aren't THAT many teaching doctors that they don't move around.
I will say one thing. DO's do have a higher fail rate for the USMLE. I believe this to be an artifact of the "second rate" status that has been assigned to DO schools over the last 100 years or so. I will not argue that some DO schools have, historically, accepted some students who probably can't "cut it" and this has contributed to the higher DO fail rate. That being said, I think that this has changed drastically in the last 10 years and will only continue to change. Any DO that passes the USMLE (or the COMLEX for that matter) is worth their salt and capable of anything a board certified MD can do.
Also, keep in mind that DO's want to remain separate from the allopathic world. They (I guess I should say "we" now) believe that we offer something unique, and while I personally feel that there is some difficulty in conveying that difference to the world, I do believe there are slight differences in the approach to patient treatment. I do not believe one approach is better than the other, they are just slightly different. DO's want to remain unique, and not be absorbed into allopathy, as has happened to other types of medicine in past centuries.
Sorry if this was a little off topic, but as someone who could have gone to either type of school, it irks me to see threads like this. All of my classmates are very capable students who could have "made it" just fine at any MD school in the country. Not being allowed to rotate at a hospital is archaic and, frankly, dumb.
