Why are acceptance rates for osteopathic schools so low?

[Skeeks]

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.

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[Skeeks]

"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)

wow that was interesting

 

[SpecterGT260]

"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).

 

[Skeeks]

Haha, I was wondering if you were going to mention cranial, because if you didnt I was going to point out the same thing! That stuff is just plain odd, but it should be noted that most DO schools are not teaching that now (correct me DO students if I am wrong).

I agree with you about the difficulty publishing in more reputable journals due to the nature of the study, that does keep it from looking more scientific. That said there is definitely more work to be done and it does need to be fine tuned.

I am facinated with OMM not just because some of it has merit, but because of the ingenuity behind it. I mean really, think about it, back in the 1800s this would have been some of the most effective treatments they had available to them before most pharmacotherapy really began. How did they come up with it without the methods and knowledge we have now? To me its kind of like learning survival medicine. I may not use it everyday because some techniques may be obsolete to more conventional methods, but it sure could come in handy if you are ever lacking the fancy gadgets that dominate our medical world today.

 

[SpecterGT260]

Haha, I was wondering if you were going to mention cranial, because if you didnt I was going to point out the same thing! That stuff is just plain odd, but it should be noted that most DO schools are not teaching that now (correct me DO students if I am wrong).

I agree with you about the difficulty publishing in more reputable journals due to the nature of the study, that does keep it from looking more scientific. That said there is definitely more work to be done and it does need to be fine tuned.

I am facinated with OMM not just because some of it has merit, but because of the ingenuity behind it. I mean really, think about it, back in the 1800s this would have been some of the most effective treatments they had available to them before most pharmacotherapy really began. How did they come up with it without the methods and knowledge we have now? To me its kind of like learning survival medicine. I may not use it everyday because some techniques may be obsolete to more conventional methods, but it sure could come in handy if you are ever lacking the fancy gadgets that dominate our medical world today.

I.... suppose that is one way to look at it.... I tend to think it started due to the lower therapeutic indices of older medications before proper testing was implemented for pharmacological treatments. Pharm can be highly effective but also highly detrimental and have a low TI, and OMM could have low efficacy but very low detrimental effects and therefore have a higher TI. That said, it is ok, and regardless of efficacy there is likely a place (for the time being) in terms of adjunct therapies and application to patient outcomes (actually.... there is even a compelling argument for use of raw placebo in terms of outcomes ). However OMM has a glass ceiling above it, while pharmaceuticals can be refined and made to be more specific. I somewhat fear the "natural and holistic" movement because I tend to think that mass ****s in opinion from more modern techniques to those deemed more "natural" serve only to slow down progress. NIH funding DOES follow the popular opinion as dictated by the elected officials on the overseeing committees all the way up the ladder, at least to some degree. The NIH responds to public outcries 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.

 

[Skeeks]

Ture. I certainly agree there needs to be progress and research devoted to new treatment. However, just because OMM is an old form of treatment doesnt mean its peaked though. Its possible that there may be many different ways to apply OMM that could be beneficial. Your body is full of naturally produced endogenous chemicals. Pharmacotherapy is aimed at mimicing, enhancing, or inhibiting those endogenous chemicals (NTs, hormones, ect.). However if there is a way to stimulate the body in such a way to acheive the same results can you see the potential? You talk about TI, that is the major problem of pharmacotherapy. What happens when a patient reaches tolerance levels approaching their TI? What if you can supplement a treatment like OMM with no TI? I know this sounds far fetched, but that is exactly what many of these studies of OMM are aiming to do. I dont hink its anymore futile than searching the world's billion plus supply of active pharmaceuticals.

The other advantage to OMM is the realative ease in which a treament can be implemented. A new drug can take ~15-20 years to pass FDA regulations. A new OMM treatment could easily be approved in a couple years due to virtually no adverse side effects.

 

[MedPR]

Wow I was completely ignorant to the fact that technically it's harder to get a spot in a DO school than an MD.

Edit: don't worry about me though guys. I got higher than a 31 so I'm a shoo-in for MD.
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[xXIDaShizIXx]

Wow I was completely ignorant to the fact that technically it's harder to get a spot in a DO school than an MD.

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Welcome to SDN.

 

[SpecterGT260]

Ture. I certainly agree there needs to be progress and research devoted to new treatment. However, just because OMM is an old form of treatment doesnt mean its peaked though. Its possible that there may be many different ways to apply OMM that could be beneficial. Your body is full of naturally produced endogenous chemicals. Pharmacotherapy is aimed at mimicing, enhancing, or inhibiting those endogenous chemicals (NTs, hormones, ect.). However if there is a way to stimulate the body in such a way to acheive the same results can you see the potential? You talk about TI, that is the major problem of pharmacotherapy. What happens when a patient reaches tolerance levels approaching their TI? What if you can supplement a treatment like OMM with no TI? I know this sounds far fetched, but that is exactly what many of these studies of OMM are aiming to do. I dont hink its anymore futile than searching the world's billion plus supply of active pharmaceuticals.

The other advantage to OMM is the realative ease in which a treament can be implemented. A new drug can take ~15-20 years to pass FDA regulations. A new OMM treatment could easily be approved in a couple years due to virtually no adverse side effects.

Yes, that is the focus of most of the OMM literature that gets published anywhere of significance. It is a valid pursuit. We are getting much more hypothetical so don't take anything I am saying as carved into granite or anything. However, tolerance is not a universal issue with drugs. It also doesn't necessarily mean that you lower the TI because someone gains tolerance to a drug. Morphine is a good example. There is technically no maximum treatment to morphine. Respiratory depression and impact move together. Now, I could kill someone outright with it by giving a dose that wouldn't even knock the edge off of the pain of a end of life cancer patient.

I am not really aware of them developing new techniques. At least not in broad sense. There may be some refinement of things, but I think the major umbrella terms are pretty much all we are going to get. Even then, significant effect needs to be established before the FDA will approve it. Otherwise it gets the OTC branding of "not evaluated by FDA" like herbals and the like. There may be more complex laws regarding manipulative treatments... not sure. Either way taht is kind of a moot point. Personally I just don't see us determining new avenues by which to manually stimulate and alter the body's pathways faster than we develop chemicals to do so. Many of the pharmaceuticals we use ARE natural compounds. They still have side effects because most of these compounds are highly regulated. A good many of the drugs are either harvested or synthetic (identicals) human proteins. The major problem that gets overlooked is that illness is already "homeostatic" perturbation. Compelling the body to change its behavior or just providing the body with what you want it to have do not have to be different. In a good many cases the body isn't even its greatest advocate.

The sorts of things that I take larger issue with are endeavors that are not mechanistically defensible. A little while back someone linked me to a paper where DOs were using OMM on infection patients. I cant remember what the infection was off the top of my head, but it was in-patient, so something sucky They used standard of care + OMM or placebo touch therapy, and found a significant difference in the amount of antibiotics given to patients by providers, the length of stay, and something like the general comfort level. Couple major problems - nearly every patient was able to identify if they got OMM or placebo, the primary metric, antibiotic use, was under the control of the providers who were not blinded (and reckless to not follow treatments protocol IMO), and the difference in hospital stays were pretty minimal albeit "statistically significant". The issues were written off by the authors and the paper was presented to justify new use and research. Kinda shady IMO.

 

[psychgirrrl]

Its fcking annoying that any time I tell someone in this city that I am in med school they are ALWAYS (seriously like 9/10 times) "oh penn?." No PCOM.....oh where is that? lol

Ive started to tell people I go to jeff just so I dont have to bother explaining anything.

There are plenty of self masturbatory types at DO schools. Yeah you might not get the "I summer on the cape" types as much but you still have plenty of people that think they are the ****. "Well I am an EMT B" or "When I shadowed in the ER"...or something of the like is something you will get sick of hearing very quickly. I know a kid who literally lists every "accomplishment" hes ever had since his freshman year of ugrad in his e mail signature. I **** you not its something like 10 lines long. Douchebaggery abound Not to mention the tools who feel the need to ask questions every lecture for no apparent reason just so they can hear their own voice. Its esepcially annoying if you are older and actually had a real career and ARE awesome...like me for example . No but seriously I had a med student last week argue with me over something I did professionally for almost a decade because of something he misread in robbins. It comes with the territory.

This made me laugh so much.
When I was treasurer in a college club the president put that she was president of this club as her job on Facebook...she was interesting to say the least...

I also hate when kids think they are so much smarter than you and everything you say to them turns into an argument where they repeat exactly what you just said but in different words and an accusatory tone.

/RANT

 

[Ravizzle]

Edit: don't worry about me though guys. I got higher than a 31 so I'm a shoo-in for MD.
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LOL




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[HalfListic]

OK, ok...but why are DOs so much more attractive, physically, (on average) when compared to MDs?

 

[SpecterGT260]

OK, ok...but why are DOs so much more attractive, physically, (on average) when compared to MDs?

Dumb blonds?

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[MT Headed]

Dumb blonds?

Umm no. http://www.1hothapa.com

 

[MedPR]

Umm no. http://www.1hothapa.com

Sorry man, not hot. Too muscle-y for me.

 

[CarlisleBeans]

I like to think of it like college football. MD is like the BCS conferences. They only take highly touted athletes, and most of the time thy works well for them. DO is like Boise State etc. they see potential in guys that the bigger schools would take a pass on, coach them up, and THEY turn them into highly touted athletes.

Either way, I think anyone who gets the chance to attend (DO or MD) is lucky and should feel proud.

Damn straight.