DecidedlyDO

To answer this question, I’d like to first talk about a bit of history…

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a physician, and that was something everyone in my life encouraged and supported. I had worked hard throughout high school and college with this end goal in mind. I had taken the MCAT during my fourth year of college (to have some reassurance from the fact that the material was still fresh in my mind 🙂 ) but decided to wait to apply until the following year, electing instead to take up work as a tech for a lab on campus.

In 2011, I applied to medical school, and after long months of nerve-wracking anticipation, I received my final rejection letter. This was a staggering blow and it took me a while to pick myself back up. I ultimately decided to go for a master’s degree, and for this decision, I am eternally grateful.

To keep this blog post a bit shorter and more to the point, the skills I picked up through my master’s program led me right to the data analysis job that I have had for almost five years, now, with a healthcare quality company. I didn’t know it when I started there, but this experience would lead me right back to medicine, and with more conviction than I had ever felt in all those years of wanting and waiting.

Why? Because the time I spent in a different but related field allowed me to gain perspective and reaffirm my interest in medicine, specifically, in the intricacies and importance of the physician-patient relationship. And this is what led me to be Decidedly DO.

This is not to say that the MD route doesn’t produce physicians who are just as concerned with creating and maintaining a relationship with their patients (in fact, I also applied to and received interview invitations from MD colleges); I was just drawn in by the DO philosophy — its principle that the relationship between physician and patient should be a partnership — and supremely intrigued by the notion of “unlocking” the body’s innate healing capacity. After all, humans existed for millennia without the aid of modern pharmaceutical innovations, and while these are incredibly helpful and have pushed the field of medicine to heights previously unknown, I do believe that they shouldn’t necessarily be the first resort in a given treatment plan, and the DO training path would allow me to learn additional skills that I could employ as alternative first resorts (such as OMM).

So, that is the long and round-about path that has led me to my decision to pursue a DO 🙂 I have tried to keep this post on the shorter side, but if you have any questions or want any additional details on why I made some of the choices I made, how I decided “now is the time to apply,” etc., feel free to reach out in the comments below or send me a message through the Contact page!

Thanks for reading!