<p>First off, what you just said is key. A lot of people don't discover that they want to be doctors until late in the game, and so haven't been playing the grading game up until that point. What are these people going to do? For many of them, getting in via a MD/PhD program may be the only viable method they have for getting into a top MD program.</p>
<p>Secondly, even if she had gotten superstar grades, which I'm sure she could have, she STILL may not have gotten into HMS. Go to the MdApplicants website and you can examine those applicants with stellar scores who nevertheless didn't get into HMS or many of the other top med schools. For example, I see one guy there from Stanford who got a 3.81 GPA and a 40 MCAT who nevertheless got rejected from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Penn, UCSF, UCLA, and Cornell. Heck, Harvard, Hopkins, UCLA, UCSF, and Penn didn't even invite him for an interview. Granted, he did get into other med-schools, including Washington U, but the point is, med-school admissions are pretty fickle. You can have killer stats and other credentials and nonetheless get rejected from a slew of med-schools.</p>
<p>I disagree with the central message of this, mainly because you don’t have to do a residency necessarily for a MD/PhD to make sense. The MD gives you the big picture of how the body works, how disease can ravage it, and what drug therapies are currently on the market and how they work. This is very useful, as it provides you a basis for developing cures for disease. PhD programs are very narrow. If you have a very broad bachelor’s degree in biology, I suppose you could get some background, but even then undergrads don’t see pharmacology or pathophysiology. </p>
<p>It’s understandable that Ben, an economics/math guy, may not be aware of some of the advantages of the MD/PhD program. It’s disappointing, though, that some of the people that run MD/PhD programs don’t even understand the point of them. I actually interviewed for one where the prof told me he thought that people who end up in medical research should only get a PhD. It was really annoying.</p>