So he got money for the next three years of his residency. And when he graduated in , he owed two years in the reserves for every one year he took a paycheck from the army, 6 years in total. Following that, he went back to his practice in CA. He then decided to finish his six years until he got called up again in for a routine rotation and served at a combat hospital in Iraq for four months.
Plus, he got to watch the Saddam trial and being the physician there in case something happened. Because of this, he considered staying in the army for longer. And ultimately, it was something he wanted and decided to do it full-time, being able to make a huge difference serving the country taking care of soldiers and their families versus treating patients back home.
So in , he went full-time with the Army Reserves in North Carolina and in , an active component and ultimately volunteered in the Air Force infantry division for two years. Then he spent a year in Kansas and four years in Korea. Not to mention all the amount of paperwork and effort, it would just crush your soul. And he felt it got worse and worse every year he was in private practice. But being in the military work with a single healthcare system, you can order what you need to order and get the medications you need to get.
And Lee finds this to be very refreshing. Back in as Lee started medical school, there were 17 osteopathic medical schools across the country. And they had no idea what issues these schools had. As he and his friend met people at conferences and other events, they decided to publish a newspaper, The Osteopathic Pulse in It had articles from each of the different osteopathic schools in the country and they distributed it for free to all the schools.
Basically, it reached the first and second-year students since the third and fourth-year people were on rotation. By , they figured out how the internet worked and all those stuff. He learned how to do HTML programming and took all the articles from the newspaper and put them into the internet so the third and fourth-year people could see it online. They also had a chatroom and a forum back in , where everytime you updated a page, it created a new page in and of itself.
And everything just evolved from there. They sought to create quality content about other schools and interesting stuff. At that time, there were only websites for medical students and dental students, whom he got together with online. They decided to create one thing for everybody, hence, they created the Student Doctor Network. So the forum was just an afterthought. But over time, in , the forum just got bigger and bigger now with over 3, members , that people would now equate SDN to forums and not the other components of the site.
It was a lot of fun. It was a meek community. And over the years, it just got bigger and bigger. As Lee mentioned earlier, this was born out of a crappy advice he got from other friends and over time, that kind of drove what they were doing in making sure they had good, reliable information, along with peer support through the forums.
Lee describes how the internet has dramatically changed over the last 20 years. In the early days, they would just have 40 up to people in the forum. It was quite slow. But it has changed the dynamics of how people relate to each other on the internet.
It was a very positive community. But it has changed a lot over the years. As to when he noticed this change from being collaborative to more of the trolling and heated flame wars, Lee would describe it like a boiling frog syndrome, where you just kind of sit there and not notice it. The culture changed gradually. Additionally, he noticed that more people came on the internet and things became even more anonymous.
But usually, the forums would take care of themselves. And it worked pretty well. So in a way, it was like people just expected that behavior and tolerated it. Presently, at SDN, they had changed their moderation over the past few years, from being hands off to really keeping a close eye on what people are saying. So they had to change the way they moderated. Lee saddened by all the negativity right now but if they really wanted to provide free information to students and have a place for them to support each other, then they knew they wanted to provide that protective environment.
Lee adds that other forums have popped up over the next few years and branched out because they felt SDN was negative. To some degree, things were negative back in By taking SDN on a balance, Lee would beg to disagree that by and large, the information was very positive and people were very supportive. One of my favorite threads on SDN was from a student I did some mock interviews with.
The student got kicked out of his undergrad 20 years ago and finally realized he wanted to be a physician. After he got his acceptance to an allopathic medical school, he went to SDN for some reason and presented his stats and asked what he would do. But one response he got who was supposedly a faculty member, advised him not to go through this career path. So this was like the core of what SDN used to be.
So I raised the question to Lee whether this kind of reply would now be moderated. He explains that if the statement was honest and reasonable, then it would stay up. As an osteopath himself, Lee thinks that the bashing going on right now against osteopaths is because of insecurity. Just do whatever is right for you. Lee says he never had a problem as a DO since graduating in residency. Lee reiterated that SDN was created to provide good quality information and to help students as they go through their journey from high school all the way to residency.
But they want to remain true to their mission of providing good quality content to help students make good decisions. And so Lee reached out to me about a month ago in the hope of being able to work together, along with other organizations that provide good quality and free information to students. Moral of the story - take all advice with a grain of salt even mine and examine it critically.
Consider the sources of information and the expertise behind them, and never lose your healthy sense of skepticism! Think about all those advertisements you see on TV with sad dogs in cages, encouraging you to donate money to such-and-such charity. Appeals to Pity guilt tripping are ineffective when they stand on their own.
Pathos emotion can be very convincing, but it needs logos logic and ethos credibility for it to be a sound argument. The pre-med Appeals to Pity happen most often when students write disadvantaged essays or essays about institutional action. As illustrated in the italics above, a good pre-med example of the False Dichotomy myth is the belief that DO programs will determine your range of future specialties.
This notion might lead you to believe that DOs exclusively fill primary care specialties, with no grey areas or exceptions in between. Do MDs really have more success than DOs in residency applications? The verdict is that both types of programs can get you into residency programs, no matter their ranking.
Sure, MD programs might help you slightly for more competitive specialties, but looking at it in such an all-or-nothing way is reductive. Too much thinking in this mindset will cause you to avoid diversification or risk-taking in your application. In turn, this will lead you towards a safe, generic application that comes across rather one-note to admissions committees.
We encourage you to bend conventions and plot your journey in your own distinct way, free of the false dichotomies placed on you. In other words, we want you to be pre-med while still being yourself! In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , Willy Wonka prints a handful of golden tickets inside his chocolate bars, dispersed randomly across the globe, giving recipients a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tour his factory.
It was that simple in the book; if you had a ticket, you got to enter. The Golden Ticket myth partly arises from our inability to distinguish the part from the whole i. It also stems from our inability to accept the concepts of luck, chance, and all the small aspects that are out of our control. There is no surefire, foolproof method when it comes to medical school admissions, or life in general.
Keep an open, objective mind and make Fitzgerald proud! Learn to be Savvy! Get creative pre-med strategies delivered right to your inbox. We follow the email Golden Rule: we will never send you anything without your permission. All work on this site is our own. The content for the Savvy med school search was found on the webpages of the respective medical schools.
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