Hiding behind the cloak of Anonymity

Salvete Icterus (either an Oriole or a Jaundice),

Your comments seem to be filled with vent and anger. However, keeping with the nature of this blog, I will try to attempt to answer some of your questions and comments.

Issue 1: I would be interested to see your grades, MCAT score, recommendations, research experience, and other supporting data that say that you are in fact a great candidate.

Answer: My grades and academic credentials are not germane to this blog. Though, for argument sake I will point out that I graduate Summa Cum Laude from a top five-biomedical research institute in the United States. If you care to identify yourself and post your own academic credentials, I will gladly post mine … I am certain I will fend well.

Issue 2: You state that MD's are not qualified to sit on admissions to a medical school.

Answer: At no point in time did I state that MDs are not qualified to sit on the admissions committee. What was stated is that certain MDs who sit on the admissions committee of the University of South Dakota School of Medicine are not qualified for a variety of reasons. You claim that the qualifications of the MDs sitting on the admissions committee are absolute, however, no one qualifies this statement. You provide no instances or facts. In essence, you argue on a pointless and a baseless statement.

You mention that before the MCAT, admissions were based on GPAs alone, yet you do not qualify this response or even when the MCAT became a standard examination. Several top-tier medical schools no longer require (under absolute conditions) the MCAT (Stanford, UPenn, Johns Hopkins, Texas System). I would assume that you do not even understand or know the history of the MCAT.

You make claims that the admissions committee has absolute (maybe divine) abilities to determine what students will and what students won’t “make the grade.” Yet, there are thousands of conditions where medial students who scored high on the MCAT dropped out of medical school because they were unable to complete the curriculum. There have been countless numbers of admitted medical students who have been removed from the program due to criminal activity. There have been numerous medical students who have been removed from programs for crimes including: rape, sodomy, and child molestation. And, there have even been medical students that were expelled from medical programs for serious violation of HIPAA (check your facts before you open your yapper). In fact, one medical student, at the USD, seriously violated HIPAA (and a dozen other laws) when he discarded confidential patient files in a convenience store trash dumpster.

Issue: “I would argue that they went through Medical school before you graduated high school.”
Answer: I am not sure how you based your medical school/high school analysis since you do not have all the information available. You really lessen the credibility of your essay when you make statements that you cannot remotely back-up. The first issue you would learn in law school is to remove the emotion from your writing(s).

Issue: While before the MCATs admissions mainly relied on GPA and other supporting information, they still did a fine job of making sure that those who could not make the grade did not receive admission.

Answer: You clearly do not know the history of the MCAT nor understand the issues of academic grade inflation. I am interested in your statement indicating that “they” did a fine job on selecting those applicants that could “make the grade.” How I would love to have that magical ability to tell into the future. Based on your argument no student should ever fail out of medical school, because the admissions committee has the ability to just know who is qualified and who is not!

Issue: They know far more than you about what it takes to make it through medical school

Answer: I wish I had your insight and knowledge. It must be amazing to make statements without any facts. When did you go through medical school?

Issue: As for the PhD's and Master of Science on the committee. Most if not all of the people on the admissions committee teach courses in the medical school curriculum. They have anywhere from 5-20 or more years experience in this capacity.

Answer: What qualifies these individuals to teach a medical school curriculum? There is a massive difference in subject matter relevance between biochemistry for biochemists and biochemistry for medical students. Just because one has taught for a number of years does not qualify them as experts in the field. I have read the bio’s of each of the admissions committee members who hold teaching appointments at USD and there is nothing in their academic credentials that would lead me to believe that someone could read the same textbooks that the faculty are copying their lecture notes from and do without the faculty member. What textbooks have these faculty written? What faculty member(s) manuscripts have been cited and published and used in the standard medical school curriculum? You seem to make a lot of emotional statement (because you think they sound good), but have no sources of fact.


Issue: Again this gives a lot of experience that dwarfs yours and others in comparison.

Answer: How many times are you going to make unqualified statements? What experience. Where are the documents to back-up these claims.

Issue: They know what each student has for qualifications and they also see how well the students do in their courses and others. All of this information helps make them even better at their job of screening out applicants who will have trouble or not make it through medical school.

Answer: Wow! Again, where does one get this crystal ball? When I finished graduate school I did not see anyone walking away with this mind-telling and ability-knowing ball.

Okay, but let’s examine your argument a little closer. This knowledge that the faculty supposedly have should then be near absolute. Maybe, if as you claim, then the defense attorneys should have legal recourse to litigate the educators for mistakes that a physician makes in his/her career. The faculty have this knowledge (as you state) to decipher out the capable students from the non-capable?

Maybe, if a medical student fails a course or drops-out of the program the faculty should be held responsible or punished for this action. Obviously, with this fortune-telling ability they should have been able to predict these occurrences.

Issue: Their research experience has nothing to do with this fact.

Answer: We live in academia to perform novel, hypothesis driven research. For PhDs who are employed in a research driven field (such as the sciences), we are judged by our ability to formulate and test hypothesis. Our only record is our publication track. Clearly, this faculty has a limited publication track.

If these faculty are experts in their respective fields, as you claim, then I would see no reason why they do not have a publication record to substantiate these claims.


Issue: However many have successful research and are prolific writers.

Answer: Where are your facts, where is your evidence. Please do not reply back with papers written 10+ years ago.

Issue: Not all articles are readily available on pubmed.

Answer: Where are they cited?

Issue: I digress; many of them have research in areas that are only a hop, skip, or a jump from translational research.

Answer: Please provide citations and facts. I am not aware of any research protocols from the current admissions committee that have ever been translated (as you claim) into mainstream medical practice.

Issue: Many of the SD faculty also have large research grants, which shows that on a national level judged by their peers they are successful and therefore deserve these large funds.
Answer: Please provide links and citable references … I cannot find these research grants as you claim. Please do not provide references to endowment funds.

Issue: The admissions committee is set up so that one individual serves 3 years and then is replaced by another.

Answer: Many of the admissions committee members have been sitting on the admissions committee for 10+ years. Once again, you make statements without providing details. I have the list for the past 15 years … care to challenge me?

Issue: The pool of qualified individuals again all meet particular criteria that I have kind of alluded to in this last paragraph.

Answer: What are these criteria? Who set the criteria?

Issue: Are you doing any work at comparing to other medical school admissions committees?

Answer: Absolutely.


Issue: Did you apply to any other schools?

Answer: Not an applicant.

Issue: Do you think Deans have much time for medical practice/research all while teaching courses and also serving in their administrative roles?

Answer: Hundreds .. most at the finest universities have research roles, clinical practices, and productive research laboratories.


Issue: Do you have the grades, MCAT scores, and other pertinent supporting information for everyone that has been accepted in the last 5 years and for everyone that has been denied?

Answer: Yeap … Under the Federal Freedom of Information Act this information is available and is in my possession. Also, AMCAS publishes a very nice compendium of statistical information relate to this topic.

Issue: You mentioned pubmed, in which if you do a simple search will bring up many publications that address the correlation between MCAT score and USMLE I and II scores as well as success in residency programs. This research is obviously based on credible information, so I ask where is your credible information.

Answer: Yeap, there have been a lot of papers that have concluded this same result (check to see who funded the studies though) and there have been an equal number of research papers (also available through PubMed) that come to the complete opposite conclusion. The same argument holds true for the GRE and LSAT.


Issue: The MCAT is difficult for a reason, medical school is worse. If one cannot make the grade on the MCAT you will have little chance in medical school.

Answer: Hold your horses on that one. If this were the case then 10s and below on the MCAT would signify high risk of medical school failure … this is just not the case. The MCAT average for USD was about 9 (and has been lower prior to computerizing the MCAT). Also, we should then start rejecting a large majority of black and American Indian applicants, as their GPAs and MCAT scores tend to be much, much lower (check out AMCAS for these statistics). Also, females tend to have lower science GPAs and MCAT scores than males, but the admissions rates are at least 50/50 or higher favoring the female gender.

I think your argument is critically flawed!


Issue: The sheer amount of material covered just in the first two weeks of medical school dwarfs an entire semester of undergraduate or even graduate course work.

Answer: Maybe at your undergraduate institution … but not most. I think a lot of PhDs would disagree with your statements … at most major universities the PhD students and the MD students sit in many of the common courses.

Clearly, you make super-hero statements on this issue … you should check your facts … or provide a course syllabus in comparison to a major universities syllabus for a similar course. I think you will find out quickly how ludicrous your statement(s) is/are.


Issue: In regards to talking about fundamentals of medicine and biology: you left out anatomy, biochemistry (still existed before the dawn of molecular biology), pathology-the bulk of medicine, pharmacology, microbiology, psych/advanced behavior, neuroanatomy, immunology (sorry but this has not been an area of science that we have been completely in the dark on by any means even before 1984) and all the other clinical skills.

Answer: You make an argument that has no fundamental basis. Each of the fields that you mention are interlinked. The fields of molecular medicine are truly the new fields that are less than 25 years old. Have you heard of personalized medicine, siRNAs, genomics or modern drug development? The field of immunology has been “known” for quite sometime, however, the molecular mechanisms of immuno-gene rearrangements and immunobiology are in their genesis, and were not known or capable to be studied before modern super-computers and advanced molecular techniques. We have come a long way since Danny Koshland’s discoveries.


Issue: Just because PCR was not invented (you are wrong on the date) 1971, credited in 1983 however. It does not make them unqualified. If you believe you become obsolete just because new things are discovered after you are done with school then you should not be in an MD, PhD, MD/PhD, or masters program even. In the professional world you are constantly learning.

Answer: Nope, sorry, you are wrong. The formulation of the mechanism of PCR was not “discovered” and released to the public until about 1983/84. The ’71 paper described a mechanism that was similar to PCR, but an unrealized concept that did not realize the necessity for Taq Polymerase.

Never made a mention about life-long learning … just that these people on the admissions committee (especially the MDs), probably, have little or no experience in the fundamental of modern biology.

Issue: I am also concerned that you are speaking so badly about a group of people which includes one of the major experts on mitochondria who was one of the pioneers who helped increase our knowledge of that important organelle.

Answer: I never spoke badly about anyone. This is not a blog about personal feelings. “If it’s too hot in the kitchen, get the hell out!” I am simply pointing out facts … and sometimes the truth hurts. Anyone from the faculty is welcome to comment on this blog. We will be hosting a call in radio show and anyone is welcome to comment. More on that to come.

Who is this “world-expert” that you mention? Please, before you throw out a name, understand that my background in the History of Science and Medicine is quite profound. Just because someone things or professes to be an expert, does not mean they are. Were they published in Science, Cell or Nature? Are they cited as principle references in current texts on the subject?

Issue: Speaking of individuals with out of country education. Are you qualified to say that a person with a PhD from india, iraq, china, or the UK is not as good as a person with a PhD from the US.

Answer: I never made any negative statements on the goodness of individuals. I did make statements on the quality of education that one might have from these countries (and other) that you have mentioned. Without question, there are a lot of very smart people all over the globe. I made a statement that these individuals just do not appear to have the necessary qualifications to sit on a medical school admissions committee if they do not have the proper training, experiences, or education similar to the applicants.
Issue: Do you even know any of these individuals?

Answer: Some of them.

Issue: All of these individuals are more than qualified and are far more intelligent than you give them credit.

Answer: Each individual is welcome to post their presumed qualifications in the website.

Issue: The individual in question with a masters of science. Do you know anything about this person?

Answer: Yeap!

Issue: If you do your research you will see that this person's husband was a PhD who formerly taught and designed much of the curriculum for gross anatomy. You will also find that this person has been teaching gross anatomy for decades. It does not take an MD or a PhD to know ones anatomy. What it takes is experience and I am sure this person can point out and talk about anatomy better or at the same level as many physicians and PhD's.

Answer: Maybe her husband was qualified. Just because she married a PhD does not make her qualified.

Issue: How does being an augie graduate, SDSU graduate, or clergy member qualify anyone to be on the admissions board?

Answer: What are the qualifications of the current committee members. Does this medical school not represent the people of SD? Shouldn’t members of other institutions, who following your above arguments should be equally qualified, sit on the admissions committee to assure a fair and balanced selection. Shouldn’t members from the community, to which will be medically served, sit on the community?

Issue: Apparently they know what it takes to make it through medical school? Explain that one for me.

Answer: When did a majority of the current admissions committee go through medical school? Right back at you!

Conclusion:

Clearly this author has some real issues. For most of the post only emotional statements were made and no real facts were presented. The point of this blog is to expose the underlying issues of the USD School of Medicine. It is the principle hypothesis of this author (a citizen of SD) that the USD School of Medicine is failing in its mission to educate and provide quality physicians to/for the people of the State of South Dakota. We deserve better than this.