Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog

What makes you think that any corners will be cut? How many corners are cut at the Tijuana Techs of the world that have sprung up secondary to the intransigence of the domestic allopaths and their purchased cow eyed politicians when it comes to opening more schools domestically? Does it matter? The answer is no. You still have the board examinations and you still have the residency requirement (osteopath and allopath both). The thing to really worry about are the "for profit" practitioners that engage in all manner of perfidy in the name of their personal profit.
 

i love the idea. i'm interested in how it turns out. besides, if the key to producing well educated students of whatever stripe has to do with the lack of money generated by their presence at the school then we should immediately shut down all law schools as they are huge money mills. really, 40k a year to listen to lectures? 50k a to get your MBA online from georgetown?

the money to run a med school comes from somewhere. it has to. for instance, most medical schools reap huge monetary gain from their resident staff and, to a lesser extent, their students in the later years of training. i mean, no one but medical students, residents, and staff work at any VA in the country after five o'clock and on weekends. i'm not convinced that the endowments of these huge institutions or the donors 'get nothing' and are completely disinterested in what happens with their money.

cheers.
 

I would not want to be a DO right now. I have a feeling their degree is about to get devalued when this school, others like it, and the 6 or so new DO schools open along with the recommended 10 percent increase in MD school spots. DO schools are already scraping at the bottom of the barrel of people who are able to succeed in getting a college education. I would hate to see how much lower this can go.

Some DO schools do a good job, but the vast majority are very weak.

I wonder when socialized medicine comes if students will still be willing to pay 40,000 in tuition plus living expenses to be a physician? Doesn't seem like a wise investment.

One last point. I thought the whole point of DO medicine was that they were geared towards primary care and OMM. How are these students going to be primary care physicians with this tremendous debt load. The answer is they are not, they are going to try to be specialists. This raises the point of what is the purpose of DO medicine then if they are not going to use the OMM and "whole body" approach they were taught?

I believe that DOs have some tough questions facing their profession right now.
 

Anon 12:13:

You neglected to use the word "pablum" in your rant. I feel cheated.
 

There are now 29 new or planned medical schools in the United States.

What will happen is that he FMGs will be pushed out of residencies by the new onslaught of low tier MD and DO programs especially.

The number of specialist residency slots is capped and almost filled to capacity. The only excess slots are in primary care, and almost half of those go to FMGs.

Once all these new schools come online, the low tier med school grads are going to have no choice but to do primary care. It will be like law school, where Harvard grads have their pick of residency slots but the 4th tier trash schools wont be putting anybody into the competitive specialties and they will all have go to into family practice.

FMGs are in for a rude awakening.
 

The DOs are doing just fine. One of our local "whatever the litigant says is the cause of whatever 'abnormality' I can find" types that does orthopedic surgery of the spine is a DO. All in all, however, he still doesn't hold a candle to the flame of the local MD neurosurgeon who never saw a litigation patient that was not a candidate for microdiscectomy.

~Criminallopath~
 

How many private medical schools are there now? I can think of a few: Harvard, Tufts, Stanford, USC....the list is long.

They all make a profit - and a damned nice one too.
 

Speaking of DOs turning a profit, check out the items they are marketing to DOs nowadays.
 

As a fourth-year DO student who is entering the match for ACGME programs, I want to sincerely apologize to the allopathic community for this disgrace. I have never been more ashamed of the leadership of the osteopathic profession, nor have I been more regretful of my choice to attend a DO school. The opening of this school is nothing less than greed and a shrewd shot at capitalizing on the thousands of undergraduates desperate to get in to ANY American medical school.

I will never pay one cent of dues to the AOA. I'm beyond disgusted right now. I'm mainly embarrassed to be a DO.
 

When the world doesn't stop spinning and the sun doesn't go nova secondary to a "for profit" school (gasp, perish the thought), will the Flexnerites be held responsible for their decades of perfidy?
 

The "Flexnerites" are all dead. If they weren't, or if they remained in any significant number, this school would not have opened.

Neither would there be state boards of chiropractic, homeopathy, midwifery, naturopathy, and so forth.
 

No. The Flexnerites still abound. The reason we have the quackery is because the quacks (specifically the quackopractors) took the allopaths to court and won.

The world will not end as advertised and life will go on. Hopefully this is the start of a growing trend that will see the allopaths join instead of hinder.
 

If Rocky Mountain Vista succeeds, we will probably see more "for-profit" US medical schools open in the future. However, I believe the financial hole that RV will potentially put their graduates in is unfortunate and appalling. But in the end, every DO and MD needs to pass the same standard set of certification examinations to practice in the US. And if RV does manage to keep up with or exceed accreditation standards, then it will be unfortunate if RV graduates have to carry a negative stigma pinned to their medical degree.