Hi there. I'm the one who wrote the post.
I guess the reason I wrote the post is that even though I'm not a DO, I have personally witnessed a lot of DO discrimination and I don't like it. You can't deny that it exists. I saw it in my own residency program (despite the stats someone mentioned, I guarantee a lot of programs discriminate) and I heard it from laypeople who make negative comments about DOs. Since my own field (PM&R) contains a lot of DOs and we are also misunderstood in a similar way, I take personal offense at DO discrimination.
That was what I was trying to express in my post. I think the comments have actually been very civil and respectful so far, and I'm very pleased. I wasn't looking for a fight and I'm not going to participate in one.
I understand that you are trying to say that DO discrimination exists, but at the same time, I wonder..
So what? The vast vast majority of DOs / DOs in training know of this already - that out there somewhere, in some hospital, there's bound to be a MD or IMG program director from back in the day that has a thing against DOs, or won't take DOs.
Does this change anything for anybody? Does the existence of DO discrimination - whether imagined or really present, change anything for current DO students/ DO doctors/ DO applicants? Or do we keep going about our business as usual? Are DOs going to stop practicing medicine because some PMR residency doesn't accept DOs? Should pre-meds stop applying to DO schools because out there somewhere, someday, a MD residency will throw their hopeful application into the trash?
If you were a minority, perhaps an Asian American, or an African American, or a gay male or lesbian female, chances are, you are going to get discriminated against at one point in your life by the majority/ majority ethnicity. Much in the same way that DOs get "discriminated" against by MDs. In exactly the same way, does that change anything for anyone? Should the Asian American or the African American stop being themselves because this discrimination exists out there, somewhere? Or should the minority carry on their business as usual?
So really, at the end of the day, so what??
As an aside, I wonder if MDs ever get asked if they are a Caribbean MD, or a MBBS? I ask because I keep getting presented to "MDs", then after a little further digging, I find out that they are from the Caribbean, or are actually MBBS from India/Ireland that have no qualms about calling themselves "MD". I have nothing against IMGs, heck, my personal physician of over a decade is a MBBS, and I only found out recently. Even at my school, there's all these Indian "MDs" with thick accents that I can't figure out how it is that after getting their "MD" in a US school, their accents can still be so stressed. Then I did a little digging, and they invariably turned out to be MBBS graduates.
Honestly, whenever I see the title "MD", the first thing that comes to my mind is to find out whether they are an actual MD from a North American school, or a Caribbean or International locale. That's simply my reality.
I ask you this because I've read/heard lots of things on "DO discrimination", so I wonder with all these foreign schools/brands competing for the US MD brand, do you ever feel like the value of the "MD" brand is deceasing? - There's a lot of "imitation MDs" out there.