I’m a medical student at an osteopathic school in a dinky town. How I got here was anybody’s guess, no really, it doesn’t quite make sense. My grades were good, MCAT scores were fantastic, I had foreign experience, the whole shebang. Apparently they want you to be more adult though and to have some experience in life, and that I don’t have. So here I begin my chronicle of an immature medical student.
Alright, let’s start with an explanation of what osteopathic medicine is. Some tripped out guy who wasn’t even professionally trained as an MD one day decides that he doesn’t like how the medical practice is run. He runs around the country looking for a place to practice basically chiropractic work (although it precedes that by a few years) and finds this dinky hole in Missouri which he calls home. That’s the funny part of it, but he kinda had a point in his work. He ended up focusing a lot on taking care of patients on all levels, and he was against the use of most of the dangerous medicines of his time including strychnine and mercury (which was interestingly used in contraceptives up until around the 1980s, yay FDA!). The end of this story is a medical profession which works alongside MDs and you basically don’t know are there because you assume they’re MDs which they basically are, except they learn to give glorified massages. Oh, the schools are easier to get into as well.
If you’ve never been to a professional school, then imagine being in high school again, but with intelligent peers. If you’ve never been to a professional school in the south, then imagine high school. I’m not saying that my peers aren’t bright, but I am saying that I don’t get them. I always thought that your mom jokes were always in jest, but a kid almost started a fight with me over a cadaver when he asked what I had said about something, when I responded with whatever I had said but with “your mom” implanted in a clever fashion. As Seinfeld would modestly query, “What’s up with that?”. The cadaver has little to do with this story but we named him Henry, he died of a heart attack, and he has lots of tattoos which were fun when he had skin. Oh and then there are Mormons, tons and tons of Mormons, and married folks, and married Mormons. The average age of my class is 25, and being 22 and still in my dating prime, marriage frightens and confuses me. I’m still of the opinion that the copious drinking at weddings is meant to dull your senses enough to the fact that people are settling down when there’s still fight left in ‘em. I wonder what the Mormons do at weddings… actually, no, no I don’t.
