As a DO I agree, a lot of the word of mouth on the newest schools (established after 2000 esp) is that they are not putting out stellar grads. In the hundred+ history of the profession, "new" may be somewhat relative-established in the 70's/early 80's is "new", but I think that a good few of them are putting out better product.
BTW there is only one for-profit med school right now and I think most of the rank-and-file of the profession hop it stays that way (and wish there wasn't even one).
I am curious however, what the impetus for the discussion of DOs in this thread was to begin with. Since the OP failed steps one and two of the USMLE and "barley [sic]" passed them on the second tries, and never mentioned COMLEX, I feel pretty comfortable inferring that he is an MD grad. The original post mentioneing the subject of DOs seems to be a randomly attached thought of "this guy [OP] is an idiot...that reminds me of two DOs I worked with..." I can see how some might get a little testy about that string of thought. My own experience has been that the worst medical school products I've worked with were USUHS folk; not all bad, in fact the good ones are very good and are some of the best; but the widest dichotomy in quality and greater number of "bad" ones. As luck would have it many of the exceptional physicians I've worked with were DOs and far, far more of the merely adequate physicians I worked with were MDs. What to make of that? Meh, not much. It's hard to generalize one person's experience to the ~60,000 DOs out there without thinking of things like sampling error. I'm sure there's a statistical term (that I don't know), but I think there is an "error" in ascribing characteristics too definitively to a group, based on experiences with a-relative-few members when they belong to a group that is "other". Why if I live next to 3 black families and most of the kids are hoodlums and I don't think much of their parents there might be a propensity for me to egneralize that experience to all black people. Or if I've worked with 45 DOs and my experience with was that there was a significant percentage of that 45 that were sub-par, then that percentage must reflect the whole. I'm not saying that the osteopathic professions doesn't have its concerns (I actually particularly share the concern that there is an impetus for DO schools to not establish true affilliated training institutions to many a student's detriment [unrelated sub-thought: at last analysis, MCAT scores were trending upward in DO applicants]) but I think when plural anecdote being presented as evidence based only on...well I'm not sure what that is based on here; even "subject matter expertise" can create problems with "data" (some poor studies are published just because some subject big-with is a co-author). So I respectfully submit that while you may be a standup guy and a leader in your field, I don't think I'm going to put too much into it--nor will I get my panties in a twist about it.
And, as for a thought about the original subject: I wonder how this dude, whom I doubt any residency in the country would want to take a chance on (even the barrel scraping ones) is feeding his two kids while he wastes time on observerships instead ofthinking of an alternate way to actually have a sustainable career?
Still, is there any way that you could give generalities about DO students you've worked with in terms of where you think their abilities are either satisfactory, excellent, or not up-to-snuff? I am confident that my education from PCOM is excellent, but I am always looking for areas that may be cause for concern.
