<p>Okay, can somebody please help me clear this up?</p>
<p>I thought residencies began after you graduated med school. Do they start while you're still IN med school?
I -think- I want to do my residency in internal medicine, without a subspecialty. Would I do a 7-year internship in internal medicine? I can't believe I'm referencing a TV show here, haha, but on Scrubs, the main character [who is an internal medicine specialty] does a rotation in surgery. Is this false info, or...I dunno, how do rotations work? Does everybody do them?</p>
<p>Medical school is four years long. The first two years are book work -- you have lectures, you have small groups, you study, you take tests. The second two years are "Clinical" years. That is, you work in a hospital, follow instructions from attending physicians, see patients, etc. Of course, you are paying tuition all four years.</p>
<p>After that is your residency. An IM residency is either three or four years long. In many cases, you are still "rotating" through various other services, just to broaden your experiences and continue to learn.</p>
<p>Medical students do rotations in a variety of fields during the 3rd and 4th years - the five standards are: Internal Med, Surgery (general, but some schools give exposure to sub-specialties), Psychiatry, Pediatrics and OB/GYN.</p>
<p>In general, you are correct that residency occurs after graduating medical school. However, Internal Medicine is only a 3 year residency.</p>
<p>There are very few, very unique number of programs that exist in which you utilize the 4th year of medical school as the first year of residency. My school has a dual-tracked program (internal medicine and family practice tracks) in which this is the case, and it's technically a 4 year program so you don't get done any sooner. The intent is to produce Primary Care docs (though not all the grads end up in primary care, I know several which are actively pursuing fellowship aspirations at the moment). The draw is that if you know you want to go into primary care, and you have significant ties to the area, you might as well get paid for your fourth year (rather than taking out more loans), and the training the M4 students receive is excellent. </p>
<p>As for Scrubs - residency programs move their residents around from month to month, so that they get exposure to a lot of different areas. One month you may be on a general inpatient service, the next in Rheumatology clinic, the next doing an ER rotation, and the next doing only night shifts in the ICU. An internal medicine doc doing a month of surgery? Doesn't sound exactly right especially with time in the OR (surgery residents are fiercely territorial about their time in the OR). But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen, especially if it was only a month. I looked in Residency Review Requirements on the ACGME and they do talk specifically about ENT experience and non-operational Ortho...so it seems possible, though likely not probable.</p>
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So each medical school has their own specific hospital or hospitals where their students study at?
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<p>Generally, or they share with other schools. (E.g Grady is shared between emory and morehouse) Also you can do away rotations at different hospitals.</p>
<p>Each medical school in the US has either its own hospital (like U. Chicago), affiliated teaching hospitals (like Harvard Medical School, which has no beds and no patients itself) or most commonly a mix of both. You can usually find this stuff on the med school's web site, but it may take some digging. </p>
<p>Some schools, Chicago among them, also place students in community outpatient medical setting for various rotations. </p>
<p>The only reason this issue may matter is that at some places, students need a car to get to training locations that are distant. But this is stuff you'd learn about during interviews and such. </p>
<p>Finally, shared facilities, like the example above (Grady), are rather uncommon to my knowledge.</p>