Steps to get an MD (or DO) and beyond

Factual Questions
1

What exactly is the process.

  1. High School

  2. College (OK but can you major in anything or must it be science or something)

  3. Med School (when you graduate do you get your MD then (or DO))

  4. Post Graduate School (maybe)

When do you BECOME a doctor? When can you write a prescription?

Are you limited in certain fields to prescribing only certain meds?

(for example could a Dermatologist prescribe Prozac?)

Do you have to practice to keep up your standing. For example lets say I am Tony Tiger MD (I’m GREAT BTW)… But then my father dies and I inherit a cereal company and go to run it. As long as I keep up my state licence can I practice just “once in a while?” “write a prescription”

2

According to Readers’ Digest:
[list=1]
[li]Find a doctor with the same first and last name as you.[/li][li]Contact his alma mater, tell them “your” diploma got destroyed accidentally, and have them send you a new one.[/li][li]Use this to get a job as a doctor wherever you’d like.[/li][li]After the authorities finally catch you, convict you, and you serve some time, repeat from step 2.[/li][/list=1]

3

Your info is basically correct. You BECOME a doctor after you graduacte med school, but its really only a title. After you do from two to ten years, depending upon your specialty, if internship work, you go through a board process that gets your your liscense to actually prescirbe medicine. You basically can prescribe anything to anybody, but doing so irresponsibly will but your reputation and liscense in danger. For example, many drug companies only conduct adult trials before releasing a drug and can say that a certain drug is only intended for people over 18, or whatever. A doctor can and often will go back and prescribe this drug for a 12 year old because 12 year olds and 18 year olds are actually relatively physiologically similar.

If you only practice intermediately, as long as the state says that you can play doctor, you can play doctor. Probably nobody will want to hire you as a doctor againwithout some sort of internship, though. This review process is not like taking your drivers test. Practicing physicians will recertify easily, but a board suspicious of your capabilities may subject you to more scrutiny before saying you can go be a physician again.

4

Well, I can only talk about Canada, and only about MD’s (I don’t think we have DO’s).

  1. High school.

  2. Most medical schools require an undergraduate degree (3 or 4 years), but a few people will get in after only two years of university.

  3. Medical school itself is 3 or 4 years (if 3 years, it’s straight through with no summers off), and only people with undergraduate degrees get into the 3 year schools.

You are now a doctor but can only practice in an educational setting.

4a. For a family doctor, you’ll then need 2 years of postgraduate work.

4b. For a specialist, the minimum is 4 years postgraduate work (but longer requirements are necessary for most).

  1. If you’re going to be an academic MD, add a minimum of 2 more years for research or other specialized training.

In Canada, only after you’ve graduated from medical school and after you’ve completed your family medicine or specialist training, can you get a license. You’ll also need to have passed the Medical Council exams (essentially, this is the equivalent of a national board exam). At that point, you’ll be able to practice and do whatever you want, prescribe whatever you want, etc. However, only a fool would take on tasks that they weren’t well prepared for, eg. a dermatologist prescribing Prozac (legal considerations!).

Continiung medical education is now the norm for all docs, although each speciality has its own requirements and monitoring. In Internal Medicine, the minimum is 80 hours per year - the equivalent of about two weeks per annum.

5

In the same spirit of as **AWB **, who obviously knows their onions, another crucial step is to ensure that at least one, preferably both of your parents is an MD and that they have the foresight to enrol you in the appropriate schools, ideally during your gestation period.

Of course, what rankles many undergraduates is that a med student will study a batchelor degree course for four years and on completion get to call themselves a doctor, whilst other disiplines, included other the doctorate in conferred only after involves several years study in pursuit of a PhD.

An equivalent would be for all graduating law students to be called magistrates on graduation.

(YMMV in terminology for the US education system)

6

Believe it or not, D.O.'s do not need a 4 year college degree. My firm sued a (very bad) doctor who got her advanced degree after obtaining a two-year associate’s degree in paralegal.

7

In the US, it’s generally

  1. 4 year college degree (needn’t be a science major, but must take required science courses).
  2. 4 years medical school (occasionally 3)
  3. 1 year of post-graduate training (formerly called internship) which makes you eligible to get a license to practice medicine and a DEA number in most states (this is what lets you prescribe outside of a hospital setting).
  4. 2 to 6+ years of residency training.
  5. if your residency training was accredited, and if you’ve now done the necessary clinical work, you may be able to sit for the board exam of your specialty. If you pass, then you are “Board Certified” by your specialty board. Some boards are pickier than others.
  6. Now you look for a job. If you find one, next you try to get on staff at the hospitals nearby. Your medical license will say that you are licensed to practice medicine and surgery. But if you didn’t pick up the credentials to do Neurosurgery during your training, don’t expect a hospital to grant you privileges to do so in their OR.
8

In the US, medical school is four years after one gets a bachelor’s degree, generally. (I’m not sure the degree itself is an actual requirement, but it might as well be.) It is true, though, that it doesn’t take as long to get an MD as it does to get a Ph.D., in general.

Just to expand on QtheM’s answer: after you graduate from med school, that’s when you can be called “Doctor”. (Not that med students aren’t routinely called “Doctor”, unofficially.) To get a license, you have to pass the United States Medical Licensing Exam, or USMLE, which is taken in three steps: Step I after your second year of med school, Step II during your fourth year, and Step III during your intern (PGY-1) year. (I take the Step II at the end of November.) Oddly enough, Step I is generally considered to be the toughest.

You also have to have a certain amount of post-med-school training, the amount of which varies widely by state. Some allow you to apply the day after med school graduation, while most require one year. Kentucky (my state) is considering requiring two years of post-grad work before granting a license, which I think is ridiculous.

IIRC, when you get a license from your state, you can get a DEA license.

As for your other questions: yes, any doctor can generally prescribe anything. Prozac is a good example; gynecologists prescribe a lot of it, because they’re the only doctors a lot of women see. Billing and hospital rules often limit who can do what, as does the fact that being out of one’s field is no defense against malpractice.

I’m not sure what is required to maintain a medical license; I’m sure it varies by state. To maintain board certification, one has to go through so many hours of continuing medical education every year.

Dr. J