Volume 96, Issue 11

An analysis of survey responses of seniors graduating from osteopathic medical schools in 1995 shows that the selection of the medical specialty they planned to pursue in their postgraduate training was considerably influenced by 10 common factors. These factors ranged from the students' orientation to people or techniques, to prestige and income associated with the specialty. The People orientation factor exerted a strong influence on students planning to pursue primary care specialties (defined as Family Practice, General Internal Medicine, and General Pediatrics). Similarly, for students planning to pursue a nonprimary care specialty, the Prestige/income, the Intellectual Content factor, and the Research Factor, with its absence of stress and opportunity for research in other nonprimary care fields, swayed their decision. These findings have implications for the medical school admissions process. If that process can be used to identify students who relate well to people and are more oriented to dealing with preventive medicine and the broad spectrum of health problems presented by individual patients, then it could become an even greater force in the movement toward generalism in medicine.

To determine if the curricula at the colleges of osteopathic medicine (COMs) are adequately preparing their graduates to meet the challenge of the geriatric demographic imperative, the authors surveyed the 16 COMs using a modified version of a survey conducted by Karuza and colleagues. Results were compared with those obtained from the Karuza and colleagues' survey of 73 allopathic medical schools. Overall, 88% of the COMs reported that they were committed to teaching geriatrics to undergraduate medical students, compared with 72 % of the allopathic medical schools. Lack of time and appropriate clinical facilities were the two greatest barriers to committing more time to geriatrics in both osteopathic and allopathic undergraduate medical training programs.