"Osteopathic schools receive 3.5 applicants for each person admitted compared with 2.4 for allopathic schools.
Even though acceptance into osteopathic schools is more competitive than acceptance into allopathic (MD) schools, osteopathic school admissions committees are more geared towards identifying other variables besides grades and test scores, a process intended to produce more empathic physicians."
From the Kaplan website, actually read this last night and did a double take about the competitiveness. But, it does make sense in light of what we're talking about.
(source:
http://www.kaptest.com/MCAT/Get-Into-Med-School/Research-Med-Schools/osteopathic-option.html)
Kaplan really shouldn't be taken as an authority on anything. The part right after your bold part was something we just got done talking about in another thread
The part you put in bold may technically be correct, but there is a false implication there. Remember that competition and selectivity are two different things. While it is a competitive process to get into medical school, it is also a selective process. Those more fitting of the primary criteria are more likely to be selected. This point actually bolsters sterling's point from earlier: There very well may be more hopefuls for DO school on a "per seat" type of analysis.
I have heard similar things for PA school, where they look at the apps/seat and say it is more competitive than medial school. Same sort of thing happening here. I don't want to imply that anyone who got into medical school could just walk right into a PA program, but at my school which has both types of programs: The average academic and EC achievement is higher in the med school than the PA school for incoming students. And our PA program is more highly ranked than our med program, relatively speaking.
Yes, but NIH grants go through rigorous review before funds are given. Its not like these people are just doing whatever they want. Many medical schools do their research by this method.
Secondly they are being published in good peer reviewed journals some examples:
Experimental Biology and Medicine
Clinical Rheumatology
BMC Health Services Research
Lymphatic Research and Biology
American Journal Of Obstetrics Gynecology
Just to name a few.
Really how you are getting funding for your research isnt as important as where your findings are being published. In this case they are well represented.
Yes I agree. Some of those grants are quite large too. I am a little surprised. And yes... impact factor is quite important. Um.... This isnt a horn tooting moment or anything, but I personally have a publication at a single transnational journal with an impact factor equal to all of those combined
😳. Those aren't bad journals, but as a rule specialty specific and highly specialized are not "good peer reviewed journals" when discussing the importance of publication. Yes, they are both "good" and "peer reviewed" in their own right, but using them to assess the importance of the work isn't going to go very far. AJOG is the biggest journal listed there and the major reason I can't claim to have beaten the entire list.
Just in case I digressed too much, I am not knocking the work. Just clarifying the misunderstanding. The fact that they are getting that amount of NIH dollars IS quite impressive, and it is just kind of a fact of life that manipulative and non-translational research doesn't tend to go very high on the impact scale. Much of it has to do with the controls and the inability to provide a a molecular or mechanistic basis for many of the findings - a must for the bigger journals. Personally I would like to see more work done on these things out of osteopathic facilities. I personally DO think that OMM has benefit, as opposed to some of my MD colleagues who post around here. I just think it needs to "trim the fat" so to speak, because for every dollar spent on a legitimate study, someone is spending money defending some of the sillier techniques with biased work or just plain bad science (I have yet to see a cranial paper that isnt a blatant placebo effect due to the control system of the study).
In an ideal world (my ideal world) a 3rd party would investigate each either in a primary fashion or just do a massive meta and and just pass judgement on the relative efficacy of each and we just be done with it. There is more ground to be gained by investigating the unknown than there is in proving a dude from 100 years ago right in a controversial treatment.
