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med school curriculum vs. pa


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Medical School curriculums are considered by many to be hellacious! On a scale of 1 thru 10, 10 being extremely painful/hellacious; where on the number scale would PA studies be? I think it's safe to say that any med. school graduates can pass any PA programs but can any PA graduates go thru med school successfully? I just wanted to know how many PAs are confident that they could do med school if, they chose to do so.

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My own personal opinion, I think anyone who is successful in PA school can definitely succeed in medical school. However, I don't think a med student may necessarily be successful in PA school. The DO's at my school are not required to attend lecture and usually complete their school day around 1 pm. However, PA students are required to attend class from 8 - 5 pm. My friends who are DO's often exclaim, "I don't know how you all do it!" With that being said, we also share several classes with the DO's, so it's not that the material is that much different, it's just a matter of time!

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Docs do 150 weeks over 4 years, PA's do 100 weeks in 2 years...you figure out who spends more hrs/day in class.

at my program pa's were there 8-5 and docs were 8-2. they also got off the summer after ms1 while we went straight into rotations.

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With the exeption of the step exams, PA school and Medical School match up pretty well in terms of academic intensity.

 

Yes and no... and you could get yourself into trouble with statements like that. Med students cover much more depth of material than we do. They learn more of the hard core basic background sciences and we just leap straight into the clinical stuff our first year. It is true that we spend more hours per day in class, but I would be very hesitant to make any comparisons about academic intensity or the amount of material learned per amount of time. The aims and methods of PA and med school education are a bit different. We're talking apples and oranges here, so comparing isn't really fair. Each can be very challenging. Having never gone to med school, I can't make an objective comparison between the two. :)

 

However, all that being said, I do think that I or any of my classmates would have done just fine in med school had we chosen that route.

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With the exeption of the step exams, PA school and Medical School match up pretty well in terms of academic intensity.

 

Not really. The classes that I have taken with the DO's (Pharm, Respiratory, Renal, Geriatrics, Cardiology) have definitely been more detailed than those courses delivered by our PA faculty. You also have to consider they are taking a broader scope of coursework ie Biochemistry/Cell Bio.

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Another big factor is that while the core curriculum is the same, there are some major differences in approach to providing the education. Many PA schools are unaffiliated with MD/DO schools and have their own model. Our schooling starts in May where we are given the quick feed of M1 material, and then in the fall we take 90% of our course work with the M2 students and have very little contact with the PA faculty. We sit in on the same courses, take the same exams, get the same treatment. So far everyone has been able to handle it. By in large I don't think that it is a matter of not being able to cut it in Med school, but a difference in what you want out of a career. I'm not going to claim that all PAs could cut it in med school, but I know there are a few med students who have failed the same classes that all of us PAs passed. (It's also a numbers game, 150 med students and 25 PAs.)

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I thought that everybody brought up some great points. It is then safe to say that PA school is no walk in the park! With the exeption of the step exams, PA school and Medical School match up pretty well in terms of academic intensity.

I took a walk in the par every day from 8am to 4pm for 2 years. It was very difficult. It was no PA program.

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The Med students definitely go into more detail than we do. We cover the high yield clinical stuff in a shorter amount of time. It's apples and oranges, or at least a green apple and a red apple. But the question was "could PA students handle Med School?" I am confident that anyone who can successfully complete a PA program could do just fine in med school.

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I didn't get out of any of those "fluff" courses in PA school! :confused:

 

Med students have a bunch of BS classes on liberal feelgood crap like "singing cumbayah to your patients" or "how to hold an AIDS patient's hand and cry with him while you tell him he's dying"

 

As far as I know, PA schools have managed to avoid all that fluff.

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I didn't get out of any of those "fluff" courses in PA school! :confused:

 

We have had some great end of life lectures as well as some patient case scenarios with paid actors in our seminars. And even tho I've worked around my share of AIDS, I still learned something. By the way, Gordon, PA-C (so you say), HIV is rising fastest in the African American female population at the moment, so you might want to adjust the pronoun of who you'd never cry with. Seems you have a bit to learn about up-to-date HIV/AIDS epidemiology, as well as current PA education.

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We have had some great end of life lectures as well as some patient case scenarios with paid actors in our seminars. .

 

well, you still have to take bipc don't you...talk about fluff..."biopsychosocial issues in pt care"....quote from a friend of mine at the final after I told him I had finished all the required readings the night before, "there was a book for this class?" (he still passed having not read a singlwe page of the "required" text.)

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well, you still have to take bipc don't you...talk about fluff..."biopsychosocial issues in pt care"....quote from a friend of mine at the final after I told him I had finished all the required readings the night before, "there was a book for this class?" (he still passed having not read a singlwe page of the "required" text.)

 

We do, Kaplan & Saddock's Clinical Psychiatry. And there are other students in my class who somehow are still waiting for the text to come in the mail (*coughs*). Personally, I wouldn't want to go on my Psych rotation without it. As for BIPC, we just had a lecture on LGBTQI issues. When the lecturer explained that 95% of male pedophiles identify as heterosexual, a young student raised his hand and said, "well, what's a homosexual then?" And you're telling me that lecture wasn't important? Detox, dementia vs delerium, eating disorders, violence detection and counseling ... these are not "fluff" issues in my opinion, certainly not any more than learning about 'Bronchiolitis Obliterans Organizing Pneumonia'.

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Med students have a bunch of BS classes on liberal feelgood crap like "singing cumbayah to your patients" or "how to hold an AIDS patient's hand and cry with him while you tell him he's dying"

 

As far as I know, PA schools have managed to avoid all that fluff.

 

They have to have those classes, since all those med schools don't have students who are as compassionate and empathetic as you are!

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I know a local physician who went to PA school got certified and worked a year then decided to go on to medical school. He said minus the first year it pretty easy. He even kept a part time PA job to help pay for school and got out with low loans. I know is anecdotal but he seemed to think they were similar or at least PA school made for good prep. He did state very sternly that nothing can really make the first year "easy" but it did help a lot.

 

That is the closest to a comparison I can give you and that is purely me telling you what i was told.

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I do wonder about something - I know the two are not equivalent and should not really be compared, but do you think the difference in intensity is exaggerated by the folks on SDN and the like? There seems to be a sentiment that NOTHING in the world could ever even approach the insane difficulty of med school, and that it is insulting for anyone non-physician or med student to even claim to possibly understand. Yeah, it's hard. I get it. ...but is it really so hard that no mere mortal could understand? That mentality just rubs me the wrong direction because it totally belittles anything we (or anyone) do. Again, I'm not saying we're the same... but THEIR comparison doesn't exactly seem fair either.

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I know a local physician who went to PA school got certified and worked a year then decided to go on to medical school. He said minus the first year it pretty easy. He even kept a part time PA job to help pay for school and got out with low loans. I know is anecdotal but he seemed to think they were similar or at least PA school made for good prep. He did state very sternly that nothing can really make the first year "easy" but it did help a lot.

 

That is the closest to a comparison I can give you and that is purely me telling you what i was told.

Much agreed. Several people who graduated from the PA program I am currently attending went on to medical school at some point after graduation. It seems to be a common theme that PA school is "helpful" but doesn't make medical school necessarily "easy." These individuals also worked part time as a PA during med school to supplement loans, living, etc.
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