Osteopathic Medicine: A Comprehensive Guide to Education, Trends, and Careers

Osteopathic medicine's holistic approach and rising popularity are reflected in record-breaking application numbers.

### Osteopathic Medicine: Myths and Realities
* 🗣️ **Gina Moses**, Associate Director of Recruitment and Application Services at the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM), discussed osteopathic medicine.
* 👩‍⚕️  Moses highlighted osteopathic medicine's philosophical approach, focusing on **wellness and prevention**, contrasting it with the historical allopathic approach.
* 👨‍⚕️  She emphasized the four hallmarks of osteopathic medicine: the body as a unit (body, mind, spirit), self-healing capabilities, the interrelation of structure and function, and rational treatment based on understanding the whole person.
* 🦴  **Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment (OMT)**, a key component, involves hands-on diagnosis and treatment, utilizing the body's interconnectedness.
* 📈  Application numbers to osteopathic medical schools have seen a **record-breaking increase**, reflecting a growing interest in holistic care and a shift in societal perception of healthcare.
* 📚  The speaker detailed the educational requirements, emphasizing that it's a **lifelong commitment**, similar to allopathic medicine, including the MCAT exam, clinical experience, and letters of recommendation.  
* 🌎  DOs have practice rights in over 60 countries and are increasingly sought after due to the focus on primary care.
* 👨‍🎓  The presentation included data on applicant profiles, including GPA and MCAT scores, and the growing number of osteopathic medical schools in the US.  "By the year 2019, perhaps sooner, every one in four medical school students in this country will be attending."

I'm very excited to introduce our speaker for tonight; she's a well-known voice in the world of osteopathic

medical education.  This is Gina Moses. She currently serves as the associate director of Recruitment and Application Services at the American Association of

Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine, which is in Maryland. Prior to joining ACOM in 2006, Gina was the assistant

director of Law and Health Professions advising at the University of Maryland, College Park.  And she has served as an

academic specialist at Georgetown University Medical Center, where she worked with pre-health students successfully matriculating to medical

schools around the nation. And for more than 10 years, Gina was at the University of Southern California, as you may have

heard earlier, and served as the principal pre-health academic advisor for pre-med students. She's

also an alumna of USC. So we're very excited to welcome Gina here tonight to tell us a little bit more about

osteopathic medicine and osteopathic education. Thank you for coming, Gina.

a truly a pleasure to be back in California. So we're going to talk a little bit about osteopathic medicine.  I'm

going to present a lot of information about what's happening in terms of data, what's trending in the profession,

a little bit about application numbers, how that's impacting and helping to actually change the workforce

in this country in terms of medicine. So we're going to go ahead and get started. So a little bit about ACOM. ACOM

is the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine. We were founded in the late 1800s, and we support all of

the colleges of osteopathic medicine in this nation. And as Shana said, we're located in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

You're not too familiar with osteopathic medicine. I would submit to you that it's really a philosophical approach.

It's an equivalent to, um, our colleagues in the allopathic or MD world, but it's really a philosophical approach, if you

will, on how osteopathically trained students and practitioners look at healthcare and at medicine. So it was

founded in the 1800s by a gentleman named Andrew Taylor Still, hence our founding institution in this country is

at Still University, which is located in Kirksville, Missouri. Um, the interesting thing about Andrew Taylor Still was he was trained

as an MD, and if you know a little bit about medicine, they were doing all kinds of things that they thought were

curative and preventative—bloodletting, for example. Well, we know that's not really, really based in anything solid,

right? So, um, I always ask you guys, especially those in the audience who may have an interest in pursuing medicine

and osteopathic medicine, I want you to think about this as future physicians: the goal is to bring about wellness,

right? Prevent disease, um, wholeness. And so here's Andrew Taylor Still. He's trained as an MD, um, he lost all of his

children, and they were very young, to meningitis, and the doctors and the physicians, um, of the time couldn't save

his own children. He couldn't save his own children. So really think about that: here you are, trained as a physician, and

you're not able to save and protect and bring wellness to your children, and they died. And I really like his quote:

“The object of the physician is to find health; anyone can find disease.” So think about that. We all know when we're sick

or we see sickness, or we see disease, or we see illness, but as future physicians, and for those of you that have an

Interest in medicine: the goal is to bring about health, right? To find health, and that's a key thing I want you to

think about for osteopathic medicine. And so today, in the 21st century, there are four hallmarks of osteopathic medicine.

They set the tone; they set the foundation; they are the founding principles. So, number one, we recognize

that the body is a unit: body, mind, spirit. Number two, the body is capable of self-healing, self, you know, and and

health is part of that self-healing, health maintenance. So I always like to give the example: I cut

my finger; it bleeds; it heals—self-healing properties, right? Number three, structure and function are interrelated. Okay, so I was sharing with

some of you that I went to the Redwoods and I took a hike. If I had fallen, if I had broken my leg, my

function and structure would be totally different, right? Because the leg's broken, how am I walking? What's the function

and the structure interrelated? And lastly, osteopathically trained physicians believe that rational treatment is based upon this very basic

understanding of the whole—again, body, mind, spirit; it's the whole. So if one part of your body is injured or impacted, another

area is equally. So finding the underlying root cause, finding the whole, is what the goal is for osteopathically

trained physicians. I like visuals; I think they help tell the story. So, as you can see, it's all about osteopathic

manual treatment, osteopathic manipulative treatment. You may hear that—OMT. Um, you will also hear the jargon

OMM—osteopathic manipulative medicine. Okay, OMM, OMT. Okay. So truly, the training of future

osteopathic physicians in this nation, at our schools, um, are cutting-edge. We have cutting-edge programs; we have cutting-

Edge technology. I was just at our South Carolina campus, um, our Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, which has a

branch down in the Carolinas—state-of-the-art everything, top to bottom. I mean, it's incredible.

And so osteopathic medicine is a younger profession than our allopathic colleagues, and I would say that many of

the schools rise to the challenge of what is happening in healthcare. What, um, are the curriculum issues that are

taking place? How are those incorporated, bringing it now in the present, not because, oh, this is how

we've always done it. We have hundreds of years, and this is how we've always done it. Osteopathic medical schools really

rise to the challenge of keeping it current, really hitting that refresh button. Um, primary care—that's that's an

item I'll talk about a little bit later on. Primary care training is a hallmark of excellence in osteopathic medical

schools. If you look at the data, osteopathic schools produce the nation's primary care physicians. Um, this is a

strong foundation in which to move forward in your practice if you want to specialize, because primary care is a

spectrum—cradle to grave—and it really does look at treating the whole patient. Okay, in terms of the medical

education and the timeline, I think it's also important to be very transparent. So if you have a desire to

go into osteopathic medicine or you want to have an idea of the training and the education, it's more alike than it is

dissimilar from that of an MD. So four years at an undergraduate institution, four years at an osteopathic medical

school, three to seven years for your, um, your internship, your residency, and if you want to specialize as an osteopathic

Trained, um, physician. Yes, you can specialize an additional one to three years out. So here's the takeaway message.

For anyone who has an interest in health care or what it takes to become a physician in this country, whether it's

DO or it's MD, it is truly, truly a lifelong commitment to your education—at least 18 years out, okay? And

the other thing I always like to say to the audience is this: think about the last time you saw your

physician and tell me that you want to know that your physician is current, that he's up-to-date on whatever it is that

you go in to see him or her about. Because if you say you—you're not—and you want to go into medicine wrong,

you never want to go see a doctor that doesn't keep up right with what's trending, what's the latest, what's

happening in whatever particular area of medicine. I know I would never want to go to see a physician who's not current, and

there's so much information out there, um, that these folks need to stay current on. So, when we say it's a lifelong

commitment to education, to learning, it truly is. Because, again, none of us ever wants to go to a physician that closes

the book at the end of—was 11 to 18 years, right? You wouldn't fathom it.

Wouldn't fathom it. Everything that you need to become an osteopathic physician in this country, um, is the same in terms

of the requirements of what you would need to become an MD or an allopathic physician in this country. So: biology,

chemistry, math, physics, English, um… Now we're looking at biochemistry, molecular… uh… the MCAT exam. And if you're not too

familiar with the MCAT exam, it's the—that's the exam that tests so that you can go on and become—get into a medical

school, whether it's MD or DO, that exam is changing and it's going to start reflecting some of the humanity, some of

the social sciences, psychology, um, you know, some of those other types of soft skills, if you will, or softer um, areas. Um, and so medical

education is changing and it's pushing changes into the entering pipeline for future physicians in this country. Um,

your letters of recommendation, your volunteer experience, your clinical exposure—all of those things that you would need for an

MD institution and to go on to become an MD, you need the same exact things, same exact everything in your portfolio for

an osteopathic medical school in this country. So again, DOs truly do bring something extra, something special to medicine. What is that? It's basically

this specialized training that I referred to earlier as OMM, OMT. It's gained over 200 hours, about 200 hours

over the first two years of your education at an osteopathic medical school. Um, DOs truly are experts; their

hands become diagnostic tools when they're treating their patients. Has anyone here had an osteopathic physician treat them? A few of you? Wonderful. Okay.

So you kind of know what I'm speaking uh, about. They're going to be hands-on with you if they practice and use OMT. Um, they

are going to be hands-on with you, and that's really powerful. Think about the last time you went to a visit and did he or

she touch you? The power of touch is incredible; it's healing almost in and of itself. But DOs really do bring this extra training

into how they treat their patients, how they're looking at their patient, looking at those—the four tenets—looking through

the lens of the four tenets that I talked about earlier, and their hands become part of that. Um, if you have good

eye-hand coordination, if you were an athlete, um, if you were a kinesiology or exercise science major, this might be a really

Good fit, it might resonate with you, um, if it is something that you have a desire to go into, um, and a lot of DOs

actually will tell you that they were a student athlete, or you know, they were involved in something and a DO treated

them and it just inspired them. And this is something that they can offer and bring to their patients, um, and again,

like I said, I like the visual, so it's about understanding the whole interconnectivity of the human body. If I

had a shoulder injury, a DO isn't going to just look and treat my shoulder; he's going to recognize, or she's going to

recognize the head, the neck, the arm, hand, fingers, the back—it's all interconnected. And if they use their hands and they

manipulate my muscular structure, they might determine, oh, I have a rib that's, you know, out of alignment.

And if they put that rib back into alignment, it takes the pressure off the nerve that was projected to the shoulder.

And that's the beauty of Osteopathic Medicine. An MD is not trained like that; that's not in their training, so they'll

Osteopathic Medicine: Myths and Realities

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Introduction of Gina Moses and Osteopathic Medicine

Introduction of Gina Moses, associate director of Recruitment and Application Services at the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM).

Osteopathic medicine is described as a philosophical approach to healthcare, equivalent to allopathic (MD) medicine.

Founded in the 1800s by Andrew Taylor Still, it emphasizes wellness and disease prevention.

The goal of osteopathic medicine is to bring about wellness, prevent disease, and achieve wholeness.

Four hallmarks of osteopathic medicine: the body as a unit (body, mind, spirit); the body's self-healing capabilities; the interrelation of structure and function; and rational treatment based on understanding the whole.

Osteopathic Medical Education and Training

Osteopathic medical schools are described as having cutting-edge programs and technology, emphasizing primary care training.

Osteopathic schools are highlighted for producing a significant number of the nation's primary care physicians.

The timeline for becoming an osteopathic physician is similar to that of an MD: four years of undergraduate study, four years of medical school, and three to seven years of internship/residency.

It's emphasized that being a physician requires a lifelong commitment to education and staying current in the field.

The requirements for becoming an osteopathic physician are similar to those for an MD, including prerequisites in biology, chemistry, math, physics, and English, and taking the MCAT exam.

Application Data, Trends, and the Future of Osteopathic Medicine

Over 25% of first-year medical students are attending osteopathic medical schools, with projections for this to increase.

The 2014 application cycle saw a record number of applications, and the 2015 cycle showed a further increase, indicating growing interest in osteopathic medicine.

The increasing popularity of osteopathic medicine is attributed to societal changes and a growing preference for holistic patient care.

Data on applicant versus matriculant numbers highlights the competitive nature of admission to osteopathic medical schools.

California is identified as the top state for pre-med students, and many attend osteopathic schools in other states due to limited seats in California.