Medical Thread

[BarakzaiAbdali]

manana for the post.

I want to combine my medical profession with my political goals. I have concerns for all poor people, especially those most afflicted here in the US. At first I volunteered at a free clinic to get my "experience," but then I saw the scope of unfairness in this nation when it comes to treating and providing medical care for the undeserved. I also volunteered at a homeless shelter for the same wrong reason, and then ended up seeing the pain and hardship that a 10-year old boy had to deal with in regards to maintaining an interest in his education while being moved from one place to another. The world is not pretty, and most people are evil and wicked, and have been fooled by Iblis with materialism. Time and time again, I see that self-happiness is a form of evil that has manifested itself into people who are considered good. Like they say in the land of the blind, the One-Eyed is King.

I consider all Muslims and Pashtuns my family. I want to leave this world knowing that I worked towards their security, and gave them protection. And gave them their due standing in the world. I want to leave this world knowing that Afghanistan and Pashtuns are better off and have a flourishing nation. I also wish to be buried in Pashtun lands. I want my blood to return ti the soil.

When I talk of not wanting to be a statistic, it is not about wanting glory, but more so about mattering in this world, especially, for my Pashtun Muslims who no one else right now seems to be concerned about. I care for the well-being of all people (regardless of race or religious creed), but the Pashtuns need a lot of attention right now seeing as no one in the world (even the Muslim World) seem to care right now for them.


So in the meantime, I will be a doctor, but I will carry all this into the political spectrum.I want to do my residency elsewhere and not in the US. I will do medical school here in the US, but want to do residency elsewhere. I want to join with other people in opening as many free clinics as possible in Pashtun lands, and most importantly orphanages/schools. I plan on having a huge focus on orphans for 2 reasons: 1) they deserve to be given a shot at a quality education, and 2) the future leader will come from these children. So in essence, I want to raise up a class of people who can fill all of Afghanistan's ranks in terms of government, the health sector, and most importantly, the military. These are the people that will determine Afghanistan's future, not Karzai.

James Joyce once wrote that Ireland is the sow that eats her farrow. He was referring to a Clintonesque, nationalistic politician named Charles Parnell who generally was a champion the Irish independence cause, but was caught having an affair with a married woman. Therefore, the people tore him apart despite what he did for them. Many idealists are great people, but pragmatism always has to be coupled to idealism to enhance effectiveness. A part of what Islam allows you is to understand that you have an obligation to your brethren, and I admire your goals. However, you also have an obligation to understand that, whether it is due to poverty, population enforced competition, maintaining one's status, some our greatest champions understood that our people have the best traits in them and the worst traits in them (as I am sure we all do as individuals as well). A part of your duty is to also be good to yourself and your loved ones and understand these ground level realities (as I am sure a smart person like you already does). There are people on the ground there that will care for you like their own son and protect you to the bitter end against anyone else, but there are people that would sell you and cheat you faster than the eye can blink. That does not mean that all of the aforementioned do not need your help, but it just means proceed with caution.

With that in mind, are you already in an allopathic MD granting institution? Are you currently applying to be in one? If so, you should strongly consider completing your residency here. The US system is set up to encourage continuity. This is why on the ERAS residency application, the question comes up: Did you do a gap year, and if so why? Their hope is that it was for research or some sort of year abroad doing clinical work. However, if the gap year was not wisely spent, you are put at a disadvantage compared to your peers when applying through the ERAS/Match. Moreover, leaving the system sometimes makes it difficult to return and can limit your options.

Moreover, I have a number of strong professors here who did faculty work and collaboration with their British colleagues and noted that the American trained intern is ready, compared to his colleagues abroad to take on nearly all emergent life threatening illnesses. The other systems are sometimes harder to switch into. In fact, many foreign grads are surprised at how welcoming, despite the hurdles, our system is. Furthermore, the time that it takes to reach and attending and even fellow level in the British system is very drawn out. Being a foreigner puts you at an immediate disadvantage and may even disqualify you per their recent law changes that resulted in many Indian grads who had put in years of time and effort having to return to their country empty handed.

Also, this may sound like the antithesis of what you might expect based on what I have written before, but as much as the need exists for primary care oriented people and pediatricians, there is also a need for gifted specialists. One should not be ashamed to compete for the highest order of specialty, including, and this be a shocker, plastic surgery. I have a close family member who is in Plastics and goes abroad on yearly sojourns to build up academic centers in third world nations and to treat extremely debilitating injuries or advanced congenital deformities. Ob/Gyns are obviously doing a whole lot of their share to contribute.

What often happens in medicine is that lines become drawn by uninformed folks and outside factors. As more and more Muslims have entered medicine, family pressure has come to a head and made it so that becoming a relatively less powerful family practitioner or general internist demands far less respect. I remember one Arab guy who is an internist told me that he was interested in a girl for marriage and that her father found out he was general medical doctor and basically showed him the door! This is utterly ludicrous because anyone who is on the inside knows that everyone plays an important role and that a general internist is not exactly a starving artist by any means. A solid general practitioner knows how manage a wide variety of disease states and knows when to refer to specialized levels of care. They help make people's quality of life better if they adminster proper care. They also are the gateway to the community and can make their home anywhere with good return.

However, folks also make a mistake on the other side. The assumption is that specialists are greedy and that they are power hungry and that serving the people is the special domain of the internist, primary care doc, or pediatrician. This is a fallacy and has no basis in reality. Trauma surgeons save lives every day and live a pretty devoted existance. Dermatologists and ID docs can treat very rare, tropical, and challenging illnesses.

Bottom line is that its a team approach and each field within medicine offers its own perspective and contribution to the unique jirga that is the whole of it.

[unknownprince]

I disagree with you on some of what you said above, but since this is a medical thread, I will pm you later on.

oh, I said I will be applying to medical school soon. Excuse me if I gave the impression as if I was already there LOL.

I want to do medical school here, and then do residency elsewhere- a place where I can form several political contacts Thats the plan for now Im not an idealist, but I will accomplish all my goals, especially in this regard, and I have thought about practical ways of going about it, and I can see that they are all within reach. Im looking for like minded people. Anyways...

...I will need tips from you on my personal statement and how to present my profile. Obviously, I will not mention that I intend to leave to another place once I am done. Thats the only way I can achieve my political goals while attempting to be good at being a physician.

Thanks, I will let you know when the time comes.

Please detail to us how you went about applying and how it was for you.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

I disagree with you on some of what you said above, but since this is a medical thread, I will pm you later on.

oh, I said I will be applying to medical school soon. Excuse me if I gave the impression as if I was already there LOL.

I want to do medical school here, and then do residency elsewhere- a place where I can form several political contacts Thats the plan for now Im not an idealist, but I will accomplish all my goals, especially in this regard, and I have thought about practical ways of going about it, and I can see that they are all within reach. Im looking for like minded people. Anyways...

...I will need tips from you on my personal statement and how to present my profile. Obviously, I will not mention that I intend to leave to another place once I am done. Thats the only way I can achieve my political goals while attempting to be good at being a physician.

Thanks, I will let you know when the time comes.

Please detail to us how you went about applying and how it was for you.

Sure in the coming weeks I'll detail that phase of the application process. Ill work on discussing:

1) The process itself
2) How to approach the AMCAS (its been a while since I went through that process so you can correct anything that might have changed)
3) Academic versus Primary Care Schools and how to approach applying and interviewing at both.
4) We can go back and forth about any tough interview questions and what the interview process entails/should proceed like
5) What you can do individually to strengthen your application (we can always do this through private messaging if you feel more comfortable that way).

I look forward to it.

[Mysterious Jilay]

Well I'm planning to go to Med-School as well inshallah, but for now I'm still in my freshman year of college. I heard doing a biomedical pre-med major is a good idea because the Med-Schools look at it differently. I'm planning to specialize in Dermatology inshallah, and also go back home and help out or something. I'm just kind of confused if Biomed is a good major or not....and the whole MCAT is freaking me out!

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Well I'm planning to go to Med-School as well inshallah, but for now I'm still in my freshman year of college. I heard doing a biomedical pre-med major is a good idea because the Med-Schools look at it differently. I'm planning to specialize in Dermatology inshallah, and also go back home and help out or something. I'm just kind of confused if Biomed is a good major or not....and the whole MCAT is freaking me out!

1. Do you mean Biomedical Engineering or do you mean some other major called biomedical research or biology?

If you mean Biomedical Engineering here is what I have to say about that. I think there are a number of excellent departments out there, including Johns Hopkins and Duke's. At one point, I helped screen potential interns for a prestigious BESIP program (Biomedical Engineering Summer Internship Program) at the NIH and for subsequent in house post bacc grants. These schools appear to graduate engineers that are specialized enough to actually be productive and design oriented. I found that these two schools produced motivated and capable engineers that were technologically proficient and armed to program well. They usually transition well into the work force and are able to tough it out.

However, if you are utilizing it as a backup and would potentially stay in engineering if medical school did not work out, I would ask to you reconsider your major for the following reasons:

The foundational engineering professions: Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering/Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Civil Engineering, have little respect for the UNDERGRADUATE degree work that goes into getting a bachelors degree. They appear to respect folks that have a bachelors degree in the foundational fields and then potentially acquire masters or PhD levels certification in the subspecialty of Biomedical Engineeering.

I think the reason for this is that the graduating bachelors degree biomedical engineer (BME) is viewed as a "jack of all trades but a master of none."

Unfortunately, I think that this stereotype actually plagues ALL engineering education in the US across ALL the disciplines due to the general movement that took place in the 90s towards graduating folks that were less technically savvy but could interface well in the era of globalization. I believe that idea was to build a cadre of engineers that would direct their global colleagues at acquire designs and prototypes at a lower cost. The problem is that technical prowess is paramount to being an engineer and without it, you really do not know what to direct in the first place. You become dispensible at some point to your company because your salary may increase with pay grade and time with the organization, but you do what four young graduates could do at lower salaries that all combine to equal your own. They will cut their losses and get rid of you and replace you. This is another whole discussion in and of itself.

If you have confidence in your capabilities as a student and think that you can keep up with the engineering mindset in BME and work, while balancing your premed prereqs, then I say go for it though. Your first semester and year performance will be a clue into how well you will progress. In this case you then have to understand you are devoting yourself to using BME as a stepping stone and not an end-all way to make a living.

**Coming to the application process with even a 3.5 in BME is considered an accomplishment because at the end of the day, despite the stereotypes other engineers have about it, medical doctors have a deep respect for the field. They usually understand that a BME had to be able to handle tough electrical engineering and device design course work alongside molecular and biological studies while their biology colleague wer a bit more focused on the latter. It convinces them that the the applicant is devoted to a possible academic approach to life and will do research oriented academic medicine at some point. They feel that this applicant could be their translator or link to the technological world that fuels biomedical research.**

However, do not at all be deluded, as I am sure you are finding out right now, its a tough bachelors degree field and you will be working and competing against a group of very smart people for the most part in your own field and the premedical group.

2. The other engineering back up options

If I had to do it over again, I would probably have done chemical engineering with the premed prereqs as opposed to electrical engineering. The reason for this is that the additional course work to take the MCAT and to be able to apply to medical school overlaps more easily with Chemical Engineering than the others. The added benefit is that if you do not make the grade and cannot get into medical school, you have a very lucrative national (within the US) and international capability to land a job that will provide for you and your family. This is much harder to do in Biomedical engineering where job options are limited unless you search in the right places and supplement your BME degree with an MBA or PhD or a double major.

Some schools allow a double major (ChemE + BME), (Mechanical Engineering + BME), (Electrical Engineering + BME). This is also an attractive but very difficult option due to the fact that you will be worked extremely hard.

3. How these fields translate into subsequent applications into residencies:

BMEs, which make into medical school in the droves (1/3 of the graduating class usually goes to medical school at most good institutions), are able to find a home in a number of different fields because their degree, as I noted above, interfaces well with medicine.

Mechanical Engineering: These folks are well liked by orthopedic surgeons if they supplement their degree with subsequent bone or endocrine/bone related research in medical school

Chemical Engineering: There is a lot of fluid dynamics and modeling that marry well into cardiology (the heart is a pump and the vessels are idealized tubes for flow etc). Your pursuit of dermatology might work well here since so many dermatological experiments and medicines work on diffusion/absorption through skin and a chemical engineer could make a treatment more realistic or design an experiment with such materials.

Electrical Engineering: If these folks can program alongside their hardware design skills they are well liked by a number of fields including cardiology (the beating heart has an electrical system that underlies it etc), Radiology, Radiation Oncology, and possibly neurology (the brain pathway and nerve connections are like electrical systems).

Computer Engineering: Well liked by radiologists and all research oriented fields due to the contribution they can make in advancing imaging.

4. If you think engineering is not panning out

There is no shame on moving into a field that can gaurantee you attain the GPA and science GPA that assure you will be a viable candidate. Below a 3.3, even in BME, is a tough sell to many medical schools. C grades already are red flags, but are not going to necessarily keep you out if there are very few of these. D's and Fs are permanent black marks unless you somehow turn everything around and have some great connections into the field.

The other fields offer a number of pathways into medicine.

5. Generalized advice

Regardless of field, you still need to do some extra curriculars and do well enough on the MCAT (see my prior posts). Ill try to post on the MCAT later on after I talk with my family members that are closer to what it is like now versus when I took it.

6. Dermatology

Excellent field and and excellent lifestyle. However, it is very difficult to get into and requires top notch USMLE step 1 scores to just get your foot in the door of a good program.

Realize that based on anecdote (not on any data I have accumulated), most folks involved in medical education and medical school admissions committees are: Internal/Family Medicine Docs, Pathologists, Pyschiatrists, Anesthesiologists, and Pathologists. The dean himself may an accomplished researcher in some prominent speciality, but in general the composition of the committees for admission I served on as a medical student showed me that these were the sort of folks that were sitting around in the committees. For some odd reason these folks can develop a bad view of folks that are generally viewed as more powerful than them with more lucrative and selective specialties (dermatologists included). For that reason, you will have to gauge who you are interviewing with.

As an example, I knew one committee member that prized honesty from the candidate and really looked for certain qualifiers. For example if a candidate said that they wanted to be a CT surgeon, and at least coupled with a reasonable statement such as "I want to be the type of academic surgeon that Judah Folkman was (he really advanced basic science research quiet a bit at Harvard)," this showed the interviewer that the candidate was interested in the specialty not for acquiring more power or making more money, but rather to serve the field as an academician within it.

However, another interviewer was a family medicine practitioner that hated the fact that some candidates entered the field with a "closed mind." My personal belief was that this committee member had either a bad experience with a specialist collegue, or was upset about the respect that specialists recieved, or had not been able to make it in herself. Therefore, she projected her beliefs onto candidates. I think this latter group of people really makes dishonest medical students and doctors out of all of us and should be utterly condemned. Unfortunately, they are a realistic hurdle in the way.

However, if you are interested in derm, you should get involved in immunological or dermpath related research that could help build your CV on the way. This looks good because you can always say you are interested in the immunological origin or certain dermatopathologies and want to lead the way in researching these as a doctor or you can even say that your mind is still open to other fields like allergy and immunology due to the fact that the field is replete with research interests.

If your school has some derm or immuno-derm or derm path related research and a good medical school nearby you can always continue you work and try to stay local at your medical school. The reason for this is that if there are MDs on these projects, and you publish with them, you can become friendly enough with them that they will want to keep you around for a derm residency.

For now though, focus on just getting into medical school because your interests may change as you do clinical rotations!

[Ashiq]

It is nice to see the doctors of these fora.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

BarakzaiAbdali how does one pay for Med school?

It is quiet expensive here in the states. There are a few ways to go about this:

1) Out of pocket. Some schools range in tuitions in the 10 thousands (in state), and others much higher. Few people have the ability to do it this way

2) Low interest loans: This is an option that most observant Muslims shun because it is interest associated. This is unless a deal is worked out with a wealthier Muslim to pay back the sum of the loan that they cover for you. Most medical students accumulate a debt of about ~$150,000. Moroever, an overwhelming majority of medical students require loans. However, an overwhelming majority are able to pay them off quickly.

3) Scholarship: Very few of these out there, but they exist, sometimes locally. One guy I knew had a full two years payed for by a local family that had a scholarship through the medical school for one student (awarded via competition/essay).

4) MSTP programs: Excellent way to go. You get an MD and a PhD and your tuition is fully covered. Its really unethical but some people do the first two basic science years and then opt out of the PhD portion. This can follow you as a black mark on your record if you try to cheat the system this way. Some people get away with it. One thing to consider though is that they are abundent but they are competitive to get into even above and beyond the standard MD admissions route. However, for what you get, you have to put time into the program. The MD route is 4 years and on average the PhD route is about 3-4 years for a total of about 7 years of schooling.

5) UHSIS: The military has its own medical school (UHSIS) and there are ROTC scholarships that cover everything from tuition to living expenses and it also offers a salary in addition. However, this entails an obligation with the US military that is problematic for many who are against the war. Doctors for the most part have little to do with the fighting, but you still end up being a part of the general scheme of things. There was recently an article in JAMA (one of the post prestigious medical journals) where Americans themselves spoke out against the mixing of medicine, CIA interrogation tactics, and militarization. The other option that allows you to avoid an overseas engagement is the National Health Service that will give you many options but you will end up serving your time in a rural community or in places like Alaska where the need is.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

BarakzaiAbdali how does one pay for Med school?

I forgot to mention in my earlier response to you that schools like Mayo Medical and Cleveland Clinic are offering full tuition to all their students. However, I believe that the latter is a 5 year curriculum with a 1 year mandatory research thesis requirement. They also usually want to see folks interested in academic medicine (treating patients alongside doing research) apply to their schools. The spots are usually limited to 30 or 40 students per year. However, these days sacrificing just a year is not a big deal at all and usually you get some big name fellowship that helps you compete for top notch specialities.

[BarakzaiAbdali]

So, now that I have helped delineate the issues that previously plagued us in internicine conflict, I think I will turn back to this (unless someone reopens a stupid thread insulting one another all over again).

Today, I think that I want to touch on Academic Medicine, a direction within the field that is close to my own heart. The reason being that this information can also help with applications. I will also touch on primary care and private practice at some other juncture.

All too often, when people think of a doctor, they think of an office + a patient + their doctor.

However, people forget that the reason the doctor gives Aspirin, a beta blocker, an Ace inhibitor etc to your loved after a heart attack is that someone had to study outcomes, someone had to study mechanisms of disease and pharmacology, and someone had to publish.

The assumption, all too often is that Physicians (MDs) are just patient oriented people and that some PhD in a lab somewhere did all of that work. This is a completely incorrect assumption. The amazing thing about medicine is that there are no limits to what you can do with your training.

If you want to be a business man with it, so be it, you can find your place quiet easily in device companies as a consultant or managing a firm etc. or within hospital infrastructure. A few lucky people get hired by companies right out of high profile medical schools and never even see a residency period. There are now many MD MBA programs.

If you want to be a lawyer, there are MD/JD combined programs out there and are growing.

If you want to be an engineer, you can always utilize your MD to come up with design ideas, quality assurance measures, and testing protocols for devices. This is why I never felt like I left engineering! My new field accomodates my prior interest and allows me to do what I have been doing and come up with designs for devices and pursue patents and eventual testing.

However, amazing men like Judah Folkner:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_Folkman

are what I call academicians.

The ideal academician MD (rarely obtained goal) is an excellent patient care physician, a cutting edge researcher, and a teacher to all levels of trainees rolled in one. Quiet often, people find that they can really balance two of these three hats.

However, the classic model of academic medicine is called the 3 legged stool model (clinical care, teaching, and research). All major academic medical schools (Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, WU @ St. Louis) all strive to graduate leaders in medicine that will become such academicians. They know they may fall short, but if they can produce one single Eric Topol, it will have been worth the effort, time, and money:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Topol
http://www.theheart.org/article/970807.do

These guys do major outcomes studies that publish in JAMA and the New England Journal as well and examine whether therapies we have been implementing actually work on a large scale.

An excellent example of a physician-scientist, as the ideal academician is sometimes referred to is Dr. Francis Collins:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins

He is the board certified MD that decoded the human genome.

To break into academics, people can do so at so many stages in there career. One can do so starting at the undergraduate level and show that they have a love of medical research.

They can then apply to either MD PhD programs that I detailed previously or to pure MD programs with a tilt towards research (Harvard, Duke, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins etc). The former pathway may allow one to be trained in further detail regarding the fundementals of research and how to obtain grants. However, some MDs that I spoke to like Ben Carson of Hopkins, told me that well trained MDs are as capable of obtaining good NIH funding as MD PhDs (so one need not despair about getting caught into a PhD track!):
http://www.hopkinschildrens.org/newsDetail.aspx?id=4946
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Carson

Others are like the world renowed infectious disease specialist, Lou Rice, who did not have much lab or research training until the tail end of his fellowship (a late but great bloomer!) He once told me that it was a single exposure to a great project that stoked his interests during this time:

http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/06/rice

So there are academicians, the leaders of modern medicine, examples of the medical giants of our era. A good muslim example is the former head of the NIH before Francis Collins, Dr. Elias Zerhouni, formerly of Algeria:

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/...Senior_Advisor

Some folks have the misconception that pursuing academics is less lucrative than private practice. In some ways this may be true, but trust me, no academic cardiologist or CT surgeon is starving. This same individual, the academic physician, can always cross over into the practice practice world if push comes to shove, but the reverse is hard if not impossible to do.

How does this bare on the Afghan struggle?

Well my compatriots, these folks will help build up our home institutions in places like Jalalabad and Khybar and are going to interface with bussiness oriented folks. These people will be devising curricula and also help transfer the standards of cutting edge care from America to their colleagues in Afghanistan/Pashtunkhwa. If the area can become a business hub in a few decades or 75 years or so, these folks will also do what India has already done and start things like Stem Cell Reseach there. It is happening in Delhi, there is no reason it cannot happen in Peshawar or Kandahar or Jalalabad my friends.

The jews understood the importance of dominating and mastering the academic domain while a number of our Muslim brethren ran straight to private practice. This resulted in Saudi lagging behind in medicine and Tel Aviv maintaining cutting edge research and care at places like the Technion. Now the gradient has reversed and technology is beginning to flow outwards from places like Israel because the jews were willing to go the hard route and the intellectual route.

We can talk more about this in the future if there are questions. I provided the names above so that people can become acquainted with great physician scientists if they apply to major medical centers at their local university. These places are also looking for academic minded people (folks that is why they want you to do research!).

[kakargirl]

wrora this a excellent contribution to the forum a medical thread where all can comes its like a walk in help service so proffessional mashallah interesting facts mashallah

[Dreamer]

I recognize those as exams that are for the British/irish systems no? Some of this depends on how you felt like you did on Step 1 and whether your degree is european vs from Pakistan/Afghanistan.

From what it appears, having an european degree from Britian from say Cambridge, or the Royal College or even schools in Ireland are equivalent nearly to the AMG (American Medican Grad) status in the application pool. In this situations you remain competitive with two digits as low as 90 or perhaps equivalency of 225 or so with the for specialities like Internal Medicine. These same grads also generally can consider applying for surgery.

The Pakistan/Afghanistan pool can be a bit more limited unless they generally emulate their colleagues in Aga Khan in terms of how they supplement their application. First and foremost the scores matter tremendously and a 99 two digit score is essential with about a 235 ro 240 being a baseline requirement on the steps 1/2. Step 3 is something that more and more programs are asking for because of the visa situation these days. So pursuing the USMLE with great vigor is an essential first step.

For the a straight shot the "easy route" possibility into the American System generally remains Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and Pediatrics. These fields are generally the easiest to find a spot in due to the massive amounts of spots that exist that go unfilled even after the regular match. The work needed to get simply a spot versus a good spot at an academic center is the issue here. If one wants to get a spot in an NYC inner city program that generally ends up being easier, but you are pretty much limited in your career options thereafter at: staying in Internal Medicine as a Hospitalist (not a bad deal at all these days with the growing need and pay due to ACGME residency work hour regulations that are growing and the good shift style work and lifestyle) or a Family Practitioner. I still think both fields are very valuable and I salute those that are brave enough to take on the burdgeoning primary care in the the US. However, competitive folks tend to shun it and think it insufficient. For some reason, everyone with even a little persian blood, like ourselves, gravitates to cardiology.

Where the paths toughen and become competitive for the Pakistani/Afghan Grads is in attempting access to solid Internal Medicine residencies in institutions like say, Emory Medical, UCLA, Stanford Univ, etc, General Surgery, and of course the extremely competitive and difficult to attain even for the American grads specialties of: Opthalmology, ENT, Ortho Surgery (rarely if ever happens), and nearly any solid Gen Surg residency. However, it is becoming more and more possible, but sacrifice is necessary. The Aga Khanis appear to be making inroads and are set up by their school to understand how to take on the system. I will delve into this more in the future, but the basics of the formula FOR THESE COMPETITIVE routes (this does not necessarily apply to the simple get into residency approach) appear to be:

1) Solid USMLE performance + 2) Solid performance on American observational rotations (another subject we can talk about in the future) to get letters of recommendation with + 3) Research + 4) Becoming adept at the interview process and having easy going conversations with your future American colleagues.

It is, 3), research, above that most Pakistan/Afghan fulbright grads shun, but that is possibly their link into the more competitive specialities if they are willing sacrifice some time and understand that humility and pain are involved. For instance, students from University of Tehren will come in, and in a period of 2 years commit to taking their steps and engage in basic science or clinical research, get to know some good clinicians, do some strong work and possibly publish, do some observation rotations and then apply. I know a few who got into Internal Medicine at top level American program that allowed them to subsequently match into cardiology. The Agha Khanis are understanding this and going to Hopkins to do ENT/Basic Opthalmological research etc and are now getting strong interviews in these fields. But these students that I met on my travels are willing to make sacrifice and take on 2 year research projects and work hard as hell.

Finally, a field that some Pakistanis and Afghans appear to shun are is Neurology. I wonder why? I know in their home countries it is viewed as on par with psychiatry, but guys, here in the states this field is accessible and cutting edge. Neurology is where cardiology was in the 80s/90s and waiting to be opened up with cutting edge research and interventional procedures.

graduated from London

[BarakzaiAbdali]

graduated from London

Dreamer wrorre, if you get the time, can you post for the sake of some of our UK colleagues how getting into the system there works? I have really not of an idea at all when it comes to the undergrad to medical school transition. I know British folks who went through their equivalent of residency, but not much more.

1) How does one get into medical school in the UK?
2) How does one get into the most competitive institutions?
3) What should one be doing at the high school/undergrad? equivalent levels over there.
4) What are the premiere institutions or the best of the best for medical schooling?

[pukhtana]

Barakzai lala,
I want to study in medical school but I don't know if I can handle it. is there any way I can audit the courses?

[BarakzaiAbdali]

Barakzai lala,
I want to study in medical school but I don't know if I can handle it. is there any way I can audit the courses?

Salaams Pukhtana, have confidence in yourself! You are a Pashtun, we can accomplish anything with the help of Khodaay Ta'alaa and a little bit of work. Can you do me a favor for the thread's quality? Your question is an excellent question. If you can offer me a little information I can hone my answer to your case. If you prefer private messaging to give this info to me, there is no problem with that either. I will ask you some key questions in order to give you the most quality answer to suit your needs. As I stated, if you prefer to answer them via private messaging that is fine, but I prefer the thread if it is no issue so that others may gain wisdom from this.

1) What age group are you in? College years (18-22)? Older than 22? Older than 30? Younger than 18?

2) Are you in the US or the UK? or another country?

3) Are you a US/UK citizen or a non citizen (I only ask because I can offer you quality info about avenues to pursue if you are a US citizen).

4) If you are in a course of study or undertaking school currently, what is it that you do?

5) Is English a first language for you?

6) Where do you feel your deficits are? Did you attend high school here in the US?

The answers to these questions will be more valuable than me telling you to audit anything because a little preliminary work will be more valuable to you and give you the answer without wasting your time.

* I will be taking care of patients in a more acute unit called a step down unit starting tomorrow (so look for my answer on Thursday relative to the American East Coast).

[Haider Bangash 2.0]

BarakzaiAbdali, does one have to take Premed in College to apply to Med school?

I was gonna ask a similar question. What major (undergrad) would put one on advantage when applying to a med school? I am a Biochem major. And how hard/easy is MCAT?

@unhiddentruth, as far as I've heard, you don't have to be a pre-med (as an undergrad) to apply to med school. You just need to be sure to take all the required math and science courses you need to get into medical school. That's the pre-med part: it's generally just a name for that group of courses and not a college major. Like I am a Biochem major and a pre-med.