A coworker of mine was talking about how a friend of his is going into the airforce soon, and wants to go into medicine, and it got me thinking…most military type schooling is super fast, yet to get a licensed to be a doctor, it takes, what? Seven, eight years? So, does the military have a suped up, in-and-out in a couple of years medical program as well for those that want to be military paramedics, or do they just try to enlist people who already have the education?
Medics in the military get so much training you wouldnt believe. Especially if they are being trained to go into combat. You gotta’ think, these guys need to be prepared to do surgery during the battle.
You can find information and even the websites for the schools by going to Google and using the government search.
My friend was a combat medic, which is not the same as a doctor. He can do emergency ‘little’ surgeries, emergency just about anything actually, but he knows just enough to get the wounded to the hospital. He can’t perform stuff like removing someone’s appendix but if you need a messed up leg patched up so you won’t die from blood loss, he’s your guy.
Yeah, “medic” != “doctor.” Aside from the fact that a doctor graduates medical school, they’re military officers. Medics are typically enlisted.
Consider that a medic is much more like an EMT (the ambulance or emergency room technicians) than a doctor.
Don’t forget the many Physician Assistants the military trains. I have rarely encountered one in the civilian world.
They are mostly warrant officers.
Oh, there are quite a few PAs around in civvy street; just that they’re not very visible. Their schooling is sort of like an accelerated Master’s , as opposed to the MD’s doctorate. (BTW a couple of years back the Army bumped up the PAs to commissioned status)
In any case to the OP: Medics and “physicians” are, as mentioned, different creatures and their entry into service gets different tracks.
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Medics are Enlisted Men who get an intensive, accelerated course in-house by their service after Basic. At some point in the last 2 fiscal years the US Army started converting all its Combat Medical Specialist, MOS 91B, and Licensed Practical Nurse, MOS 91C, soldiers into 91W Health Care Specialists, which means the end product will be someone who has the skills of both an EMT and a LPN and an actual EMT license. In the process, the training course also has been stretched from 10 weeks to 16 weeks. This person serves as a medic in the field, and as an overall health care technician/nursing assistant at the post hospital.
The Navy’s “Hospital Corpsman” is similar, though not the same, in function and training – s/he gets a bit more functions in cases in which, for instance, you’re out to sea on a smaller boat with no actual medical officer aboard.
The training crams into one semester what most civilian community colleges would take one or two years to provide, but that is possible because (a) they don’t have to bother with general ed requirements, they train jou for the job; and (b) as a recruit, you can expect to have no life outside of the needs of the service
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Military and USPHS physicians, dentists, vets (all “doctors”) as well as RNs and Pharmacists are commissioned officers, and most are direct-commissioned from civilian status after completing their degree and passing their licensing examination. A few graduate from the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, a dedicated “feeder” school that goes through the whole normal curriculum of the given profession; many others receive financial aid from the military to get through school or to pay off their student loan debt in exchange for a duty obligation after graduation; some may have started off as enlisted personnel and the service sent them to med (or whatever) school.
Back in WWII, medics got very little training.
My cite?
I read The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of World War II by Loe Litwak.
It’s a very good read.
Make that Leo Litwak, not Loe Litwak.
Independant Duty Corpsmen recieve enourmous amounts of training. Corpsmen of other varieties will be also well trained these days, but have varying levels of skill and training depending on their career paths. Never-the-less, if someone comes up to me at wreck and IDs themselves as a corpsman, I’m going to be damned glad they’re there!
Well, if you play America’s Army, you can become medic-qualified by sitting through three lectures and answering some multiple-choice tests.
Of course, within the game, medic duty involves running up to a guy and holding the E button down for about ten seconds.
Oh yes, a small detail I missed: The 3-to-4 month course is the entry level training for a medic/corpsman. They are in continuing training as soon as they deploy to their units and one of the requirements for advancement in rank is to keep adding on extra courses and trainings beyond the core MOS/rating.
According to the George Washington U. site, the Independent Duty Corpsman described by Tranquilis, by the time he completes “C-school” at HM2 rating (equiv to an Army buck sergeant in the pay scale), the HM-specific classroom training alone is worth 60 credit-hours – that’s half of the total for a BA all in courses “in the major”, and s/he has that PLUS two to four years’s actual hands-on clinical experience.
Already-graduated MD’s getting direct commissions get to go through a less-than-1-month “military orientation” course.
JRDelirious, thanks for adding that last part. Ten weeks of training seemed so, well, I couldn’t believe my life was always in their hands. By way of comparison, it took the Army 8 months to teach me how to fix a RADAR – which I think is a lot simpler than a human body!
Back in those days, though, we called the MOS medics “medics;” “combat medics” were people with other jobs that went off to a short medic training. What I mean is, an air traffic controller would go off to a two week “combat medic” training, and return a “combat medic.” Then they were ready to give first aid (I don’t mean Bactine™ and a Band-Aid™) until a “real” medic arrived.
The Navy calls their Enlisted medics “Corpsmen” because they’re the only corps in the Navy which is composed entirely of Enlisted, in addition to it being the only Enlisted corps.
Independent Duty Corpsmen not only receive an incredible amount of training, they also have an incredible amount of responsibility.
In the days when I was still on submarines, our IDC was our only medical support available. Period. He was more than capable of handling almost all conditions that might occur. When you’re on station, doing whatever it was your boat was sent to do, you could easily be a week or more[sup]*[/sup] away from anything resembling a hospital or physician. The IDC has to be able to stabilize the patient, keep them alive long enough to reach outside support, even if he can’t actually repair the problem. In many cases, the IDC can actually deal with the problem so effectively that external medical support is merely a formality.
I’ve recieved plenty o’ stitches from one IDC or another, and we’ve even had apendectomies a couple times on one of the boats where I served. Our IDC dealt with compound fractures, gastro-intestinal problems, and diving-related injuries too. Mind you, we had one of the very best IDCs in the whole fleet, but his skill superiority was merely one of degree, rather than of type: IDCs all simply rock. The only time we ever had to come off station was for a detached retina, and that took us 9 days to reach a point where we could meet the helo.
[sup]*[/sup]This is not hyperbole. I’ve been places where you can’t even surface without traveling for a week or more.
Ah, yes… the Army did do a fair amount of playing around with the semantics of who is a medic or a combat medic or a medical specialist, and the sequence of the training phases, over the years. At the time (1985-86) that I was training to be a 91Q (pharmacy tech) there were two “tracks” at Fort Sam’s HSA for those of us in medical services MOS: one (mine), which they claimed was on the way out, was to take the less-than-a-month General Medical Orientation course, like what you describe, to be then followed by the full MOS training (including 91B); the other, allegedly the way of the future, to get the whole “new” 91B course, 10 weeks with the GMO obviously incorporated right into it, THEN go on to your “special” MOS courses. At the time the TACs were “motivating” everyone in the new track to think of themselves as “Combat Medics”. Dunno how long that scheme of things lasted after I left, but apparently the name stuck to the 91Bs.