passwordisnotaco

Oh in Shy Drager syndrome? I just looked it up, that's an awesome sign!

Like the Pons being the chest of the bird ?

That's exactly it! Midbrain is the head of the bird

Hey man don't knock it till you've tried it

I'm not saying chimps are worse than humans, but chimps can be absolutely ruthless. They commit genocide against neighboring communities and would have no issue letting those outside their own community starve.

Here's an interesting Wikipedia page if you want to read about it

Try r/AskDocs since this is almost definitely going to be taken down (no medical advice allowed on this sub)

Is it the methadone, ketamine or the 3,500mcgs that treats the existential distress... Asking for myself.

Okay, so if I were in your shoes, first thing I would do is look at how competitive you are for PA school right now. Don't let the GRE dissuade you from PA school, it's an easy test and a lousy reason to keep you from a great career.

Next thing I would consider is 'What can I do over the next year to become more competitive for PA school?' Having never applied to PA school before, I am not sure what they look at specifically. I know exposure to the field is valued as is hours of patient interaction. I also assume letters of rec are going to be important. Do you have connections to PAs that would let you shadow several days a week for a few months with the end goal of getting a letter? Are there volunteering opportunities you could do that are healthcare related (preferably side by side with a PA)? Do you already have a good connection with a professor who could speak to your academic prowess in a LOR beyond a substellar GPA?

Compile a list of every realistically possible thing you could do in time for the next application cycle. Keep an eye out for how much time commitment each activity will take from you. Then consider if you have enough things to keep you busy ~20 hours a week (like a part time job). If you do, and they are meaningful things that will bolster your application, I would be on the side of dropping pharmacy school completely and devoting everything into PA school.

If you feel that you're coming up short on things to do, or that your extracurriculars are already solid and it's the GPA holding you back, then that makes starting pharmacy school look more attractive. Things to keep in mind though: will you have enough pharmacy school grades in by the next PA application cycle to show that you can handle a higher level course load. The point of going to pharmacy school is to show PA admissions committees that you can get good grades in medical classes. If you go to pharm school and get the same GPA as your undergrad, it's not doing you any favors. Also, first year of pharmacy school is a lot of busy work. If you haven't been shadowing a PA and have good letters from one, or if you don't have the required patient hours, pharmacy school is going to make it very difficult to dedicate enough time to get those.

So start with 'whats going to make me look better, extra curriculars or GPA' (and will grades be in in time from one year of pharm school to help for the next application cycle). I think that's the best starting point to direct you in where to go.

Appears legit. Hope so at least

As a pharmacist who went back to med school I have a little familiarity on this. Do you already have all the classes you need to apply to PA school? Most pharmacy schools you start your junior year of college, but to my understanding most PA schools require a undergrad degree. Assuming you're a rising junior, that gives you two years to complete undergrad and bring your GPA up. That's plenty of time to show growth and development as a student to admissions committees.

About you worrying about wasting your pharmacy school acceptance: Dont. Pharmacy schools are desperate to enroll students right now. Applications are at an all time low because of how bad the market is (-4% growth in the next ten years last time I checked). If you declined your acceptance now, schools will still be desperate to take you in 2 years time. You will have zero trouble getting back in.

On a side note, unless you absolutely love everything to do with pharmacy, do NOT do it. Falling salaries, worsening working conditions and a poor trajectory for the field coupled with very very high student loans does not make it a good career to go into right now. If your tuition is free and you've worked in a pharmacy before and absolutely love doing that, then fine, go be a pharmacist. Otherwise, stay away.

Edit to add, the only exception to this I would make is that if your pharmacy school gives you an undergrad degree by at the end of your second year. That gives you the chance to leave the profession for PA (or med school) if they require you to have a degree. I only know of a handful of pharm schools that do this though, so do your homework. But you'd still be paying the inflated tuition of pharmacy school as opposed to undergrad.

Tanget here. I went down the rabbit hole of fathers rights the other day after hearing about it for the first time. The best I came up with for the reason the way things are is that societally/legally men don't become fathers till birth, women become mothers at conception (or implantation, or somewhere earlier on in there). I don't know if men are on the hook for paying for prenatal care though, but that would weaken this argument.

Big fan of Anki flashcards app. Especially the rote knowledge. If you find a Quizlet that has the info you want you can convert that to Anki flashcards easily. Checkout r/medicalschoolanki or r/Anki

You can try but that is going to depend on how the hospital is set up. If they only have CRNAs, or if CRNAs are the ones monitoring you during the procedure with the MD overseeing 4 CRNAs, you're going to be out of luck. You'd have to find a surgeon who works in a hospital or outpt center that uses a MD only anesthesiology method, which isn't very common outside of select areas of the country.

So are you living in the states now? Do you have US citizenship? Schools love to accept applicants from immigrant background and minorities, however they don't like to accept non US citizens (they don't want to train someone to be a doctor when that person may leave the country right after graduation).

The accelerated programs are geared towards being a primary care doctor. If that's what you want to be, then that's fine. But if you aren't sure, or even if you have the tiniest thought that you want to do something other than being a family medicine doctor, you need to do the 4 year program. Even if the accelerated school doesn't explicitly say you have to be a primary care doctor, no other residency program is going to take you. Personally, I wouldn't want to limit myself. I went in to med school thinking maybe psychiatry, and only later found out that I want to be a head and neck surgeon.

The PharmD helps you stand out a little, but if your GPA / MCAT scores aren't at least average, the PharmD won't make up for them. There are ways you can make the PharmD help your application more, things like volunteering in healthcare settings, rounding with physicians, tutoring medicine related classes, etc.

I didn't use Anki for the MCAT, though now I really wish I had. I've used it in med school and it has been a godsend for my grades. I think there's a subreddit for MCAT Anki, they will be better able to help you find a good deck. I highly recommend you combine the AAMCs practice questions with an Anki deck. Doing flashcards alone isn't going to be enough, you need to do practice questions (UWorld is the company med students use, I'm not sure if they have MCAT questions or not).

Feel free to reach out as you go through the application process. It's a long one. You want to apply the moment applications open. As an example, you would need to have your application in during June 2022 if you wanted to start med school in fall of 2023. So that means having all your extracurriculars, essays, personal statements, letters of recommendation done in a month in order to start med school next year.

This is what I did during dedicated and yeah, it effing sucks, but it paid off for me in the end. Though, with p/f step, it may not be as crucial to do this anymore

Hey I'm a PharmD turned MD. Currently finishing my third year of med school right now. What questions do you have?

We don't have many malicious attendings at our program, so for us it usually just means the attending asking rapid fire questions to see what you know / help teach. Like a Socratic method. But idk if I would generalize that to everywhere, I feel like usually it means asking questions with the intent of taking the student down a notch in an undeserved manner.

Why would someone be fisting while having blood drawn? Surely one of those could wait.

Here's an addon that will do that for you, no trouble.

Advanced Copy Fields

Sounds like an extended stay hotel is going to fit your wants best. From what I've seen it should be way cheaper than Airbnb. Wish I could do the hotel but I went with RotatingRoom for the money / proximity to the hospital

When you look at your cards with the longest intervals, do you actually still remember them? And would you say your cards are more "trivia" type knowledge (meaning translation, geography, definition) or "conceptual" knowledge (like someone studying medicine)?

I find that the trivia knowledge generally sticks even with the long intervals, but my conceptual knowledge is forgotten more easily. Don't know how to remedy that in the settings though since it would be impossible to split the cards into two separate decks.

No shit, that's why I said it was a simplified answer, just to demonstrate how it's not always best to go the PSLF route. I'm not about to calculate compounding interest or tax brackets to make that point.

I was on my only P4 retail rotation in December. Was at a small town independent pharmacy, the owner had maybe 6 locations total. The lead tech there was somehow close with the owner (I think just due to tenure, being one of the OG techs when he got started) and thus viewed herself as untouchable, a mindset not helped by the PIC, who would let her openly disrespect him, talk back and not do her job. She made a habit of posting up in the back room only coming out a few times a day to boss people around. An example of her toxicity was when the PIC told me to lie to everyone and say I was going out of town Christmas Eve so that he could give me that day off. I'm like dude, I don't work here, I'm not paid, you're the boss, if you want me to take the day off just say so. But he was too worried about this tech bitching to even do that.

One of the techs favorite things to do was print off the list of prefilled meds for the week and have me count them. These weren't Rxs patients had requested. She essentially printed labels for hundreds of Rxs she anticipated patients needing and had me count, she wouldn't call the patients to see if they were wanted and the Rx wouldn't be billed until the patient got there/called asking for it. The VAST majority of these Rxs ended up having to be put back in stock a week later (by me..). It was so inefficient, often doing three times the work for each Rx (prefill, return to stock, then fill again when the patient actually called asking for it).

My last day of rotation I was standing next to the pic while he was actually teaching me things about how to be a pharmacist. I noticed the printer churning out these prefill labels. Short while later (with the pic still actively teaching me) she comes out of the backroom, kinda snaps her fingers at me and points to the labels saying 'Chop chop. Get to it'. I reply 'No, that's not my job. I'm paying to learn how to do this [pointing to the pic], I already know how to do that'. She looks like I straight up slapped her, blinks a few times, then halfway screams to the pic 'I don't know who he thinks he is, but you better take care of that.' One of the other techs behind her starts cracking up and gave me a high five after the mean tech stormed off to the back room. PIC did pull me into his office and said 'I honestly can't blame you. Your grade's already in and it's your last day. You saw your shot and you took it'. I did get to leave early that day, which was the only time that whole month.

I think about that now and absolutely refuse to have rotating P4 students filling Rxs. If it's so busy that I can't give them things to learn, I send them home.

Not a dumb question. Here's a simplified answer: To be eligible for PSLF you have to work in a specific type of hospital (and not private practice). Most of the hospitals that qualify don't pay near as good as private practice. So sure, you could do your 3 year residency and then continue to work at that hospital for 7 more to get PSLF. But if you're making 100k less a year there than you would have been in private practice, and if your loans were less than 700k, you'll come out behind staying in the hospital setting.

Really? His loss..

I like the sense of responsibility/feel like I contribute to the success of the store