First of all, many osteopathic medical schools are located in underserved areas — or as underserved as possible while still having enough of a medical community to make training possible. My school, LMU-DCOM is located in the middle of Appalachia, for example. Osteopathic medical schools generally encourage students to specialize in primary care, at least as much as they can, considering that our health care system is not osteopathic. A lot of osteopathic medical schools like abbreviations, like LMU-DCOM … for the fun of it, I guess.
The curriculum of allopathic and osteopathic medical schools is about 90 percent the same. Didactics: basic sciences, pharmacology, microbiology, systems, and pre-clinical prep work. What’s different is a course, which at LMU-DCOM is called Osteopathic Principles and Practices (OPP). As the name suggests, this is where doctors of osteopathic medicine learn about the osteopathic approach to medicine and about OMT. Clinical rotations, like at allopathic schools, cover the foundational specialties, selectives and electives. During the didactic years — many, though not all — professors are DOs. I suspect this is due to how quickly osteopathic medicals schools are being founded and the number of DOs in practice. Even among the DO professors, the degree to which the osteopathic approach is emphasized in the non-OPP lectures varies widely.
Clinical rotations are influenced more by the health care system as a whole than the particular medical school, and since the health care system is not osteopathic, there’s not as much a difference in the experience. The degree of osteopathic training largely depends on where you are and who you do elective and selective rotations with. My primary interest was practicing in Wyoming — so I scheduled my electives and selectives here where there’s not as much of an osteopathic presence. I only worked with a few DO preceptors. Based on unofficial surveys I’ve done over the years, osteopathic medical students seem to travel around the country a lot for rotations — more than allopathic medical students do.
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