What are the best areas to be a DO?

Usually it is easier if you just go to an AOA residency. However, if you are asking for ACGME residencies, then I would believe place with high prevalence of DOs help to a small degree. Most of whom practice in the midwestern region and possibly the east coast (mind you DOs are all over the place).

 

Michigan

 

Midwest for sure.

 

The Midwest. The worst place would be Boston and the Pacific Northwest, Northern California as well. These regions tend to be full of rich people who will mistake your for a chiropractor and have a heavy MD bias.

 

No offense, but I have read couple posts, if not all rooting for MD's. However, you're DO student!!!!
May I just ask you how on the world did you convince the ADCOM on your interview day, specifically" why did you choose osteopathic medicine".

 

Usually those are the type of people to avoid anyways, whether an individual has MD or DO lettering next to their name.

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1058017/

 

Northern California and Massachusetts are very anti DO places. Actually both are good places to live they just happen to be full of rich people, and rich people are picky about who they see when they get sick, as I mentioned people see brands, Toyota Mercedes, the DO brand perception does not ring to high among people in those regions.

There is still a strong notion among educated folks that DOs are poor man's MDs. It is so bad, that I even know some faculty who have their family members see MDs.

 

Ask him how he feels about being a DO.

 

I would say NYC is a good place

 

I generally agree. Many places in manhattan can be tough, but the greater NYC area is solid. There are lots of programs and schools relatively close by.

 

NYC Sucks. This is coming from a Boston guy. Cost of living is astronomical, quality of life is horribile, dirty, crowded, polluted, but for a big coastal city, its got opportunity for DOs.

 

Haha. I've think we've had this conversation before.

I did a couple years in Boston years back. Threw away my Papelbon jersey and closed that door forever.

 

Boston is a more livable city than NY by mile, much better smelling too.

 

This is the newest map from the AOA.



They counted only AOA members. The real numbers are likely different because many DOs went to ACGME programs and have no obligation to join the AOA.

 

If that map was accurate, the Midwestern states like Michigan and Ohio would have the highest concentration of DOs, also Illinois. California is shaded dark, but that is very misleading, because there are few and very limited opportunities for DOs over there, particularly in the North.

 

What a ridiculous thing to think that rich people don't know any better that a DO is like a chiropractor. I know a foreign-trained MD charging $3500 annual concierge fee for his services. People don't care about their physician's training, but rather the service and care they are provided. Moreover, rich people often have physician friends and it is unlikely that their MD friend will tell them not to see a DO.

 

Most hospitals that see wealthy patients are staffed by MDs from big name medical schools. And in metro regions like Boston, San Francisco, etc, Harvard, Yale MDs are a dime a dozen, so if you are a DO or an IMG, its not going to look to well for you because you have some serious competition.

I won't name names but one of my friends, his OMM Professor at his DO school was listed as "Chiropracter" on Yelp.

 

if you think he is a real do student, i have a bridge to sell you.
his knowledge of do schools is at best superficial and consists of parroting previous info from sdn threads, and his posting history shows nothing but negativity towards do students and do schools.

 

Boston sucks. They are pretentious (based on what you're saying) and its also small and significantly colder than ny. I barely feel like I'm in a city there. Boston can't touch NY in terms of opportunities and stuff too do. NYC is a world class city.

 

Do I need to post my ID badge? I am a real DO student, I might not be too fluffy while I write my posts. As I said, the Midwest seems to have the strongest population of DOs in the country, I think the Southeast is also open to DOs as well. There are parts of the Northeast like New York and Philly that have a good number of them as well.

Then there are regions like the Pacific Northwest, Boston, San Francisco, where you don't see too many and these are regions that are not that open when it comes to Osteopathic physicians.

 

Thanks for calling him out I was about to do so. That map sucks because it just shows raw numbers of AOA members. As mentioned above DO who go ACGME won't appear on that list. Furthermore it should shade by DO's per capita. Because California has 40 million residents of course there are bound to be more than 5,000 DOs. Crappy map.

 

If that were the case then California would be very light, Michigan and Ohio would be darkest.

Some people consider my school a de facto California DO school because 35 percent of my class is from CA.

 

Seth is saying: DOs are the doctors for the poor. Lol

 

I personally don't think Boston is all that bad for DOs. Sure, there aren't a lot there currently, because it's a heavily academic area and most DOs aren't heavily into research. However, those that are do pretty well. I have a few DO professors who did residency or fellowship at MGH or one of the Longwood hospitals and say it's not impossible to get out there if your numbers and experiences are on par with the MD applicants.

Also, there are almost always a good number of UNE grads at Tufts & BMC.

 

What a terrible figure. This is like stats 101 lol.

 

The best part about this map is the fact that if I look up the population of each and overlap it with this, the result would be the same.

Schools like SGU stated that they match the most people in the US. Now here is the thing they don't tell you....

What percentage of them do match? Just like what percentage of doctors are DOs in those areas?

 

I hate using wikipedia as a resource, but the map below is more accurate even though it was made in 2012. It shows them now as a percentage of DOs in each state. The darker the blue the greater the percentage and the red dots represent DO schools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteopathic_medicine_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Osteopathic_distribution_US2.PNG

Notice how California, New York, Texas, and Florida are lighter...




Now if someone could find a more recent figure directly from a legitimate source that would be awesome...

 

You mean former-AOA residency?

 

Isn't the first combined match not til like 2022 or something?

 

To be a DO? Any location that has people who get sick.

To land a residency? More your overall package as a applicant then location matters.

 

Correct

Tough to say. I remember one person on the forum stating AOA residency are complying faster than excepted. So it may even happen sooner.

 

In the latest presentation on the merger my school admin said a combined match was unlikely for 2017 but very possible for 2018. Who knows how accurate that is, though...

 

Oh joy....

 

so where are you going to practice? are you going to be an fm doc in bumfark, wyoming tending to farm animals while whining and moaning like a little b;tch because you don't get to service rich people in boston? did you not know that would be your fate before you applied to do school?

 

a photo on the net proves nothing.
and your trump campaign avatar speaks for itself as a desperate attention-getting ploy

 

Wasn't the idea the lesser competition as a result of it being DO only? I know there still might be some degree of preference for DOs. But with the population of MD's being so much larger, it's kind of like opening up the flood gates.

 

It's with the assumption PDs of former AOA residencies will still favor DO students. Your chances will be less than before. However, it still means your chances are better than with residences that have always been with the ACGME.

 

unfortunately yes... Not sure why it has to take so long:

http://www.acgme.org/acgmeweb/Portals/0/PDFs/Nasca-Community/FAQs.pdf

 

Where does it mention 2022? On page 11 it doesn't mention a specific date for the "will there be a single match" question. I definitely could have missed it somewhere else though.

 

Page 1:
"How do programs approved by the (AOA) become ACGME-accredited?"

I take the verbiage in this section to mean that between now and 2022 you can apply and get "pre-accreditation status." Why would there be a future date limit? Probably because they can't get full ACGME status until 2022. Maybe I'm reading it wrong. Also, maybe they can do a combined match without full ACGME status?

Edit: I think my assumption was right. Page 11 says that until initial accreditation AOA wont be in the NRMP match system.

 

Right. That seems to be a safe assumption.

 

Thanks for clarifying! Its tough to sort through a long pdf on a phone...

I don't know the answer, but hopefully we'll find out in the next couple years. I don't think it would make sense to hold on to the Osteopathic match for too long since any program not expecting ACGME accreditation should effectively be winding itself down and not accepting more students... but I'm still pretty unfamiliar with the process.

 

NYC I would say is pretty open to DOs, even amongst those with money. The DO I observed only practiced on the UWS directly across from Central Park/cash only.

 

What does all of this even mean?

You're a DO. You get into a residency. Are you saying it's going to be difficult to land a job as a physician in certain regions of the country because they won't hire DO's in that region?

Sure maybe its harder getting into a world class medical institution as a DO...but wouldn't it be pretty easy to find A job in norcal, pac nw, boston, etc...even as a lowly DO..?

 

I'm guessing it's linked to the number of DOs going into residencies in those regions. I've always heard that conventional wisdom dictates that any doctor MD/DO can get a job just about anywhere, region wise.

 

Once you get a residency getting a job is not a problem, the bottleneck is the residency, some places, actually a lot of the better places do not even look at you if you are a DO. You will find out about that in 3 years. Even if you go to a residency in another state, lets say Chicago, you can still get a job elsewhere.


Its specialty residencies that tend to be tough for DOs, fields like non academic IM, Family Medicine, EM, OB Gyn, Psychiatry, DOs can go anywhere in the country. If you are aiming for academic IM, Derm, Cardiothoracic Surgery, then its a whole other ball game.

 

I'm super early in the game, but right now I'm most interested in EM, Psych, and PMR...which are all vastly different, I realize.

Sounds like EM and Pysch (even moreso I'd think) would be easy to land as a DO. I have heard that PMR is the one field that may give DO's a leg up...but does that include academic places as well?

 

Michigan <3

Especially the areas where MSU has a campus: Macomb, EL and Detroit