Medical Will I have enough volunteer hours to apply?

[Catalystik]

I'm a senior that is planning on applying in the upcoming cycle, mostly to DO schools and a few MDs. I don't have many volunteer hours due because of time commitments with competing in varsity athletics as a 3 season athlete, army rotc, and army national guard drills. My military commitments continue through my summers making it challenging to find long term volunteer opportunities at home. I currently have 50 nonclinical hours (should have 100 or more by June) and 5 clinical( hoping to get closer to 80 by June).

How much of a disadvantage will I be at if I apply early with low volunteer hours? By the time I apply I will be a commisoned officer in the Army Medical Service Corps, and I'm hoping my military service may help make up for a not having much volunteering. To help give a better picture:
GPA: 3.53 (should be 3.58 after this semester)
sGPA:3.32 (projected 3.37)
MCAT:508
Involved with research that allows me to interact with people with progressive nervous system disorders.

I started by pre med journey pretty late and have worked hard to get my app competitive for this cycle, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I think you'll be fine with nonclinical volunteer hours as you project them, so long as you avoid applying to the MD schools that value service over stats (Jesuit schools, Rush, HBCUs, USC, for example), but I'd have serious concerns about you applying with only 80 clinical hours. Since your stats are more in line with those of successful DO med school applicants', perhaps you might consider recharacterizing your research time as volunteer or paid clinical employment (as the case may be), since you interact with current patients who have neurological disorders. DO schools view research experience as far less important than many MD schools do. You can still describe the activity's research components in your description and potentially get double "credit" for it. But it would be more important for the patient exposure aspect of it to be the most apparent to an application screener. How many more hours would that give you?

Also, you do have physician shadowing, right? Ideally with a DO. And ideally with an LOR that many DO schools require/recommend. If not, there are no downsides to getting this activity in the last few months before applying. Aim for a total of 40-50 hours, and try to include a primary care doc.

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[Catalystik]

Thank you for the reply! I do have shadowing hours and will be getting an MD and DO lor.

And I was thinking of using my research experience as clinical hours since majority of my time in the lab is interacting with the participants and taking their vitals. I also have found my interactions with the participants to be a lot more meaningful to pursuit of medicine than the research aspect of it. By the end of the semester I’ll have probably 150-180 hours for research. In your opinion it would be better to present this on an application as something clinical rather than research?

Yes. It's my opinion that listing active clinical experience of only 80 hours would seriously work against you. Unless you are willing to wait to apply another year when you'll have more active medical experience, you will be far more likely to have a successful 2019-2020 cycle if you recharacterize your time in research as clinical instead.