At what point does GPA start to hurt your medical school applications?

[bluebayou]

The thing is…most high school kids who post on CC that they want to become doctors and they want to attend a prestigious med school are NOT saying that because they’re interested in Academic Medicine.

That’s entirely possible, but I haven’t seen any statistics on this and I am certainly not smart enough to read poster’s minds.

[Pizzagirl]

Medicare does fund a lot of residency programs. This article may be a bit out of date but gives you the gist. http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/economix/2013/12/17/how-medicare-subsidizes-doctor-training/?referer=

[thumper1]

Thanks PG.

MCAT…anyone going to medical school outside the U.S. has never been guaranteed a residency spot. It’s one of the chances one takes when choosing to study medicine abroad.

[mcat2]

Thanks for the link, PG.

While Medicare-financed residency slots are concentrated in the Northeast, much of the expansion in medical school enrollment has been elsewhere in the country, particularly concentrated in the South.

“State investments in new or expanded medical schools face a substantial barrier because their residency program base is small and they lack Medicare G.M.E. [graduate medical education] funding to expand rapidly,” the paper says. “In some cases, either a state will have to fund new G.M.E. positions, or many of its new graduates will have to leave the state to find residency positions.”

I heard that many med school geaduates from Texas medical schools can not find a residency slot in any Texas residency program. Since residents will most likely work in the state where they receive their residency training, increasing the number of medical school students in a state will not help their own state; it only helps train (future) doctors for other states.

An article I read about the demand and supply of doctors in Canada are even more problematic. It was even worse that they once tried to “recruit” practising physicians from other country and could not actually give them jobs.

[mcat2]

A slightly outdated report about the oversupply problems in Canada:

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/health/1-in-6-new-medical-specialists-say-they-can-t-find-work-1.1931800

[fallenchemist]

I am not going to read through the thread to see how it got from the first few posts to the above, but clearly the recent posts have nothing to do with the thread topic. It is an interesting topic and a thread with a pertinent title would make sense. Closing this one.