<p>Just because you forgot something along the way doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful and didn’t have an impact on your ability to learn or your ability to be a doctor. by your argument, we might as well get rid of learning cellular respiration at all because clearly your favorite doctor, who I assume is a good physician, doesn’t need it to practice. Back to the good ol’ days of apprenticeship perhaps?</p>
<p>College is only a waste if you never learn how valuable it was.</p>
<p>Okay guys, you win.</p>
<p>It’s not about winning, it’s about educating. That’s the point of this forum ;). Here are some relevant examples of how college/non-clinical education can help you:</p>
<p>1) Just like how you probably don’t remember which animals were used to teach you the ABCs or which stories helped you learn to read, so can having a fund of basic science information help you learn more clinically relevant things. I certainly don’t remember every step of glycolysis and gluconeogenesis, but learning them last year DID help me better understand and memorize metabolic diseases. Further, while I may not need to ever know metabolism again, there are doctors who specialize in those things that will. A lot of medical education is about professors preparing you for the possibility of entering any medical specialty (as best they can at least).</p>
<p>2) I have a friend who just finished his Physiatry residency. He studied dance in college during his last 2 years (minored I believe), and because of that interest he is going to a Dance Medicine Fellowship program. His patients will be better of because he understands them on a personal level, and also because he wouldn’t otherwise have done a fellowship in Dance Medicine. College allows you to develop other interests that can very often affect what and how you practice. Medicine isn’t just about the clinic, college gives people time to decide that they might want to go into medical law, medical administration, medical research, medical business, etc. Having two extra years of college gives you time to develop the interest and skills that will help you become a researcher on mitochondrial disorders, to refer to your cellular respiration example.</p>
<p>" 2 years undergrad-6 years medical school?"</p>
<p>-If you are interested in 6-7 years total UG+Med. School, check out accelerated combined bs/md programs (NEOUCOM, UMKC,…others).</p>
<p>Having done a lot of work on the health policy side of things, bluntly the system does in fact need to be streamlined.</p>
<p>–Undergrad doesn’t need to become a professional program. 4 years with broad liberal arts is still an excellent idea.
–But it does need to have more extensive premedical requirements. Condense organic chemistry to a single semester and add biochemistry. Skip over introductory biology (phylogeny? really?) and add animal physiology. Anatomy and embryology might also be a good idea.</p>
<p>–Condense medical school to two years. The first year is unnecessary with more extensive prerequisites and the fourth year is not worth the time, period. The only difficulty here will be that fourth year is largely taken up with the residency application process, but streamlining that should be a pretty trivial challenge. (You could, for example, have a single designated two-week period for candidates to visit everywhere. It’d be a hellacious travel schedule, but saving the year would be worth it.)</p>
<p>–Residencies need to streamline faster. Put everybody through a single “intern” year in either medicine or surgery, but after that the specialization needs to speed up. Putting eventual trauma surgeons through seven years of general surgery residency first is excessive, for example. Putting cardiologists, nephrologists, and all of the other internal medicine specialties through the same three-year track is similarly excessive. Branch them off earlier.</p>
<p>–This is <em>not</em> a costless proposal. I’m fully aware that none of the things I’m giving up are “worthless.” Cardiologists do function better with a full three year program. Trauma surgeons do function better with a full seven year program. But they don’t function better <em>enough</em> to be worth the time that they spend.</p>
<p>–As it stands now, medical students are so burdened with debt and exhaustion that it’s a major deterrent to a lot of top talent entering the field. Nobody is motivated purely by one thing or another, and for that matter a lot of medical students themselves are exiting, where they find a lot of very lucrative Wall Street offers. Among the students I know who could have made it as doctors, most of them understand the humanitarian appeal and could easily be motivated by it – but are scared off by the years of brutality.</p>
<p>–In addition to work-hours requirements, Medicare needs to impose work-content requirements. Because residents are free labor for hospitals, they’re often relegated to grunt work. I remember seeing a team of residents poring over a Babelfish translation of foreign medical records – this is not a useful way for them to spend their time. If they’re not learning and they’re not taking care of patients, residents should be at home. Obviously there’s going to be some controversy in terms of where exactly the line is drawn, but a line does have to be drawn somewhere. The current system is unacceptable.</p>
<p>–Here’s an idea I haven’t thought too much about. Residents need to be paid more. A lot more. That much is true, but I also haven’t really taken the time to look at exactly how much of Medicare’s budget is devoted here – so I don’t have any concrete ideas about how exactly to implement this.</p>
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<p>Agreed.</p>
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<p>Absolutely.</p>
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<p>I think there’s room for streamlining the process, particularly if you consolidate the preclinical years. I feel though that in some ways the opposite is happening, as there’s a movement towards increased clinical experience while pre-clinical and also an increased importance on research, evidence based medicine as well as growing implications in genetics. </p>
<p>However, the idea of removing the 4th year is entirely unfeasible - in particular anything that significantly alters the interview season. While a 2-3 week interview window would work for for fields like Ortho, urology, or many of the other specialties, for Peds and Medicine this is absolutely impossible. You have programs that take 35, 40 even 50 interns a year. With most of the match statistics saying that peds and IM programs tend to need rank 7-9 applicants on their match lists per residency spot, you cannot have 21 days worth of 15 applicants. Most peds programs have 3-4 interview days a week starting from the first week of November through to the end of January. You’d also have a hell of a fuss from anyone doing couples match, where 20 interviews for both partners is not the least bit uncommon.</p>
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<p>I think this probably is feasible, but only in the surgical specialties - and you are seeing some of this happening like in the integrated vascular and colorectal programs that are cropping up. In medicine and peds though, I’m not so sure…and I think that there are quite a large number of residents who would absolutely protest a more rapid specialization, as they enter residency with no idea if they wish to specialize or not. The fact that some specialties are involved in the spring match during the 2nd year of residency is already another point of contention. Perhaps it’s because of my future career plans, and because peds intensive care, unlike adult intensive care, is less consultant dependent, I absolutely feel like I NEED to be a great general pediatrician before moving on. However there are opportunities to affect the pediatric training model as peds fellowships are uniformly 3 years in length (required by the American Board of Pediatrics) and are at least 50% dedicated to research activities…there are certainly some fields within peds (developmental, adolescent) where this needs to be changed.</p>
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<p>Absolutely. I don’t know what the trend is for IM programs, but in pediatrics, the development of hospitalist teams is gaining traction. It’s easier for peds though as it’s so much more seasonal in nature. It’s easy to tack on an extra set of faculty during RSV season to take care of the straightforward bronchiolitis cases. </p>
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<p>No argument from me!</p>
<p>Can you take anatomy and physiology as the general bio prereq for med school?</p>
<p>I would recommend that you take other ones for the pre-reqs. I believe some schools allow it, but others do not because the lab time isn’t the same kind of format as most bio/chem/physics courses.</p>
<p>You could, but that wouldn’t solve the problem I’m suggesting. Unless everybody does it, medical schools need to teach it. I think the process can be streamlined.</p>
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<p>You’ve gone through it, so I’ll defer to you in terms of my specific proposal.</p>
<p>But the bottom line is that adding a year – 52 weeks and $45,000 – in order to allow people to interview is simply not necessary. If push came to shove, I’d even be willing to force programs to rank without interviews. That would be horrible, but it would be better than setting aside an entire year to do so.</p>
<p>Of course, that’s not necessary. Third year is packed and busy, but could probably be streamlined enough to fit in, I don’t know, four weeks or maybe even six for interviews. My school devotes twenty-four weeks combined to medicine and surgery – you could easily shorten those to sixteen each and use the remaining eight to do interviews, for example.</p>
<p>Also, once I reach 90 semester hours of college credit, would you recommend applying to medical school? That would be at the end of my sophomore year…(I’ll have 30 after this year)</p>
<p>I took a practice MCAT since I’m a medical nerd. I scored a 25…but then again I haven’t taken o. chem or physics…just finished a semester of bio and chem (even though I already have AP credit for bio).</p>
<p>And yes, I agree with a lot of what you are saying. Not everything I learn will be related to Emergency Medicine, but I still don’t see how finding the entropy of chemical reactions (even though easy) will help me succeed in medical school. Or “knowing how to find the location of an electron in an atom.” </p>
<p>I think about how pointless some aspects of the pre-medical curriculum are all the time. If a patient come in with STEMI, and I really going to have to know, “So, the oxygen atoms in her body have an atomic mass of 15.9999 and using the gas laws, if I can determine the volume of the gas, I can use simple algebra to find the moles of oxygen in the patients lungs.”</p>
<p>Even though all of this may be interesting, I won’t need to know it as a physician. Also, evolution? Really. Interesting, but totally unnecessary as a physician.</p>
<p>Am I really** sorry. I’m typing these post from my phone which has a horrible auto-correct feature. Lol.</p>
<p>It’s not about the knowledge. It’s about learning how to think critically like a physician. That’s why med schools make you take organic chem or physics or would like to see you do research. These are ways med schools assess your ability to get through medical school and become a successful physician. If you don’t like learning random useless facts in undergrad, then you are going to hate med school. If you can’t solve a math or organic chem problem, you are going to have difficulty arriving at a logical diagnosis. You would be surprised how much of the skills you learn in college are applicable in medical school.</p>
<p>Felt I should respond to a couple things. First, this was a ways up the page, but:
The WHO ranking is a very poor metric of “level of health.” The study is terribly flawed. For starters, it is biased against countries whose health care systems do not have strong socialized elements (ie, the US). Also, it takes into account some highly unstandardized measures of quality, such as infant mortality (some countries do not attempt to save premies; other countries do not include premature infant deaths in their infant mortality statistics; this makes them seem better than the US when, in fact, they’re not). Case in point, the WHO, while a respectable institution, has put together a heavily skewed, totally unreliable study for comparing the level and quality of health between nations.</p>
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I’ll give you points for realizing that it doesn’t compare to what a doctor has to go through, but I don’t think you realize just how different it is. I’m not a doc or a med student, but I have been an EMT for several years, and the knowledge gap is tremendous. Becoming an EMT can be worthwhile, but it’s certainly not difficult. Note, I am assuming that you’re talking about EMT-B. EMT-I certainly takes longer, and becoming an EMT-P is a beast in itself.</p>
<p>In fact, I don’t even understand how an EMT-B class can be stretched for 3 years? Or even six months? There’s simply not that much information. The class I took was less than two months. We met 3-4 times a week (2 weekday evenings, 1-2 weekend mornings). Even then, the pace was much slower than any college science course I took.</p>
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Bacteria? Antibiotic resistance? Among other things. Evolution is very important, not only for a future physician, but for anybody planning a career in or related to biological/medical science.</p>
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<p>You could make the same argument for much of the material covered in the first two years of medical school, the portion that you wanted to extend for greater retention of knowledge…</p>
<p>Mike and BigRedMed: What an informational exchange, I’m definitely learning a lot–thanks.</p>
<p>WHS: clearly you don’t realize the value in a complete undergraduate education. There’s so much more to getting into medical school than taking the prereqs and doing well on the MCAT. Medicine is not a vocational degree. As an above poster mentioned, most of what you’re doing as an undergrad is preparing you for the process and the practice of learning medicine, not so much the actual material you need (as you’ve noticed with your physician friends). </p>
<p>Among other things like prereqs, you need time to do research, volunteer, work in a clinical setting, shadow, get involved, manage your time well. You need to grow up and mature and learn how to live on your own as a young adult. You need to learn to think critically like an adult, and adult who wants to become a doctor. You probably need to experience some deep, profound pain to give all the awesome things in your life meaningful context. You need to work with other people. You need to be a problem solver. I would say without hesitation that the majority of the learning I did in college was not in a classroom. It’s learning about yourself and growing up as a result. Why you think you would be a competent physician without that is beyond me. </p>
<p>The few people I know who are applying without a bachelor’s and with only 90 hours of credit have not fared well this application cycle. Each of them (there’s 4) has great stats–34/3.9 or better–yet none has picked up an acceptance yet. Most have attributed this to the fact that they just lack the life experience students just one year older clearly have. As a senior who considers herself to be pretty mature anyway, I often felt intimidated by the other people interviewing at my schools (Northwestern, Mayo, Duke) simply because many of them were older and thus had had the time to experience so many more things than I have.</p>
<p>Why have you completely disregarded the value of growing up in college?</p>
<p>It’s true that you won’t ever need to find electrons on an atom (but then again, if you go into research or just keep up with the literature of your field you will probably encounter electron related topics so it is debatable), but sometimes it’s a lot easier to learn all of the basics so that you have a foundation to build upon. O-chem and biochem would be a lot more confusing if you didn’t understand the fundamentals of chemistry. It could still be done, but the time you save in not learning it would be lost in having to memorize more because you understand less.</p>
<p>Also, I would not recommend applying as a sophomore. Your application will be significantly weaker than if you wait until your junior year or later. Stop taking MCAT exams or studying for the MCAT if you are doing so and focus on the ECs you will need to apply. You are still in high school aren’t you?</p>
<p>“Also, I would not recommend applying as a sophomore. Your application will be significantly weaker than if you wait until your junior year or later”</p>
<p>-May I ask why? Most apply in junior year. Being one year older is already an advantage.</p>
<p>I’m confused by your reply Miami, I am telling the OP to wait until the end of his junior year to apply, did you miss the “than” in my post?</p>