<p>It's the balance of research and practicing medicine. I talked to PhD advisors and they said their MD/PhD students usually end up doing one or the other. I don't want to spend 8 years earning the degree plus time doing residency and possibly a fellowship...only to have to choose between research or medicine. It's the reason my boss didn't do a residency after getting his MD...he wanted to do research more.</p>
<p>MD/PhD woud be more appropriate for someone like dewdrop97, someone who's interested in the research aspect of medicine. As I told my interviewer, I feel that getting a PhD is more about research than about teaching. After all, if you become a professor at a major university, your tenure is largely decided by the quality of research. I'm simply not gung-ho enough about research to do a phD or MD. MD/PhD's largely spend most of their time researching, not teaching. In fact, most of the clinical teachers at med schools are full-time attendings at the affiliated hospitals (ie MD's).</p>
<p>I also noted that MD's have quite a few opportunities for teaching. Obviously, as clinicians, we are responsible for advising and educating our patients but as attendings and senior residents, we are also responsible for educating future generations of doctors as well. Hence, it's not so surprising that "doctor" comes from the Latin word "docere," meaning "to teach" (interviewers love when you pull out esoteric facts like that).</p>