Tuesday, Mar 24, 2009

Posted on Mon, Mar. 23, 2009

Tarrant County Should

Defend Its Osteopathic
Medical School
By TAYSON DeLENGOCKY
Special to the Star-Telegram
Osteopathic medicine is the best-kept secret of medical professions.
Osteopaths represent about 6 percent of the nation’s physicians. There are about
3,346 D.O.s out of 43,000 physicians practicing in Texas.
D.O.s are fully licensed physicians and are recognized as equals to M.D.s at
every level of government in all 50 states. There are more similarities than
differences between M.D.s and D.O.s. The main difference lies in the osteopathic
philosophy of the preventive and holistic approach of these tenets:
The body is a unit, and the person represents a combination of body, mind and
spirit.
The body is capable of self-regulation, self-healing and health maintenance.
Structure and function are reciprocally interrelated.
Rational treatment is based on understanding the body unity, self-regulation and
the interrelationship of structure and function.
Besides following the exact rigorous curriculum of medical education, D.O.s are
also trained at least 200 hours extra in manual medicine, a hands-on technique
for diagnosis and treatment.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center recently announced its
interest in adding M.D. degrees in response to the forecasts of a physician
shortage. It was also approved to increase its class size from 170 to 250 D.O.
students.
UNTHSC and the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine have achieved some
great feats despite being a minority professional school.
It is the only osteopathic school in Texas where there are eight allopathic
schools. TCOM graduates have been able to secure residencies in the most
competitive specialties and the most prestigious institutions, such as the Mayo
Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.
TCOM has been ranked among the top 50 medical schools for primary care
medicine since 2002 by U.S. News & World Report and in the Top 20 medical
schools for Hispanics in 2005 and 2007 by Hispanic Business Magazine. TCOM
students have earned the highest scores in the nation on the osteopathic medical
licensing examination over the past two years.
UNTHSC should be proud that it already has a medical school that serves well
the community in Tarrant County and Texas by producing 65 percent of its
graduates specializing in primary care and 34 percent serving in small towns of
fewer than 25,000 people.
There has been a growing public interest in complementary and alternative
medicine in recent years. An estimated 629 million visits to alternative
practitioners in 1997 exceeded the 386 million visits to all U.S. primary care
physicians.
About 60 percent of allopathic medical schools have introduced some forms of
elective instruction in complementary alternative medicine. Even a tentative
proposal of core competencies in integrative medicine in undergraduate medical
curriculum was enunciated in hope of instilling graduating physicians with the
values, knowledge, attitudes and skills to improve the physician-patient
communication.
Musculoskeletal conditions and injuries are among the most common reasons for
visits to physicians in the United States. They accounted for more than 131
million patient visits in 1995 and cost $215 billion annually. D.O.s have been
found to be more capable than M.D.s at physically assessing musculoskeletal
conditions and injuries, according to a survey of the Steering Committee on
Collaboration among Physician Providers Involved in Musculoskeletal Care.
Medicine is as much a science as an art. I believe that the formative years are
very important in what a physician will become. The difference of patient
interaction by osteopathic and allopathic physicians has been evaluated.
UNTHSC should be proud of its osteopathic heritage and share its philosophy
with its allopathic counterparts by embracing them into the osteopathic
profession as M.D.s embrace D.O.s in their medical profession for the benefits of
the patients and advancement of medicine.
The people of Tarrant County should rally to defend this special osteopathic
medical school, because Texas residents deserve the holistic and preventive
approach to their healthcare that D.O.s have to offer.