- Joined
- Aug 7, 2017
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Hello all,
I've recently been doing some work at my lab and gotten very interested in precision medicine (especially psychiatry) and combining computing and clinical data to make more informed decisions about psychiatry that go beyond DSM-5 diagnoses (like in this paper: Identification of Distinct Psychosis Biotypes Using Brain-Based Biomarkers. - PubMed - NCBI). I've always been pretty interested in research, but working on this seems to mesh really well with the computer skills and interests I've developed over the years.
As far as a career goes, I would love to be able to contribute to these efforts throughout my professional life: tracking patient outcomes and biomarkers (among other measurements), analyzing if/how these markers correspond to treatment response, maybe coming up with hypotheses as to why any results are that way, and also teaching med students. Furthermore, I'm also pretty passionate about working with Spanish-speaking patients, so ideally I'd like to run projects that work to increase the participation of this group that is very often almost ignored in research studies. My question is: would an MD with a strong research focus or a full-on MD/PhD work better for these interests? I don't think I'm particularly interested in grant writing and running a lab, but instead the data collection and analysis, which is why I'm unsure if the MD/PhD would be right for me. Ideally, I'd like to have practice in such a way that my practice informs my research, and my research informs my practice. Does anyone have any advice as to the best way to move forward with this?
Thanks for all your help.
I've recently been doing some work at my lab and gotten very interested in precision medicine (especially psychiatry) and combining computing and clinical data to make more informed decisions about psychiatry that go beyond DSM-5 diagnoses (like in this paper: Identification of Distinct Psychosis Biotypes Using Brain-Based Biomarkers. - PubMed - NCBI). I've always been pretty interested in research, but working on this seems to mesh really well with the computer skills and interests I've developed over the years.
As far as a career goes, I would love to be able to contribute to these efforts throughout my professional life: tracking patient outcomes and biomarkers (among other measurements), analyzing if/how these markers correspond to treatment response, maybe coming up with hypotheses as to why any results are that way, and also teaching med students. Furthermore, I'm also pretty passionate about working with Spanish-speaking patients, so ideally I'd like to run projects that work to increase the participation of this group that is very often almost ignored in research studies. My question is: would an MD with a strong research focus or a full-on MD/PhD work better for these interests? I don't think I'm particularly interested in grant writing and running a lab, but instead the data collection and analysis, which is why I'm unsure if the MD/PhD would be right for me. Ideally, I'd like to have practice in such a way that my practice informs my research, and my research informs my practice. Does anyone have any advice as to the best way to move forward with this?
Thanks for all your help.