<p>Some friends’ examples, cautions and challenges.</p>
<p>Residency either for Texas or California schools should be fine. If you are switching to Texas, the plans need to be operational and effective by June or July following your sophomore year, because prime time for in-state Texas applications is June – August after your junior year in the rolling admissions process.</p>
<p>Anxiousmom is quite correct about lots of changes. Not only will your views change, so will the world around us as our economy labors under multiple claims for each asset and a runaway medical industrial complex. You (and your friends) may want to draw upon those who have gone before you.</p>
<p>“Who are you really”, “what drives you”, “what do you really like”, “what is the truth”, and “what are the realities” are questions that you need to soul search for best answers over the next several years. Historically, doing well at Rice certainly can pave the road to MD specialties - what have long been ca. million dollar per year careers for at least two of my roommates. One turned down a top 10 med school’s MD-PhD slot in California for a Texas med school (he did not think much of the scientific prospects for the particular research group’s direction then; he was right). More recently, many states away, I have run into young MD graduates (not Rice) that simply walked away from it all after a couple of years, keeping only the educational loans!</p>
<p>“Medicine” is starting to change before our eyes, with immense stresses and stakes as the professions and pharmaceuticals collide head on with financial resource limits and patients’ insistence for tangible performance. Here is a personal view from a National Merit Scholar, Rice and Southwestern Med graduate, from one of the battle lines of medicine, ten years ago: [Damaged</a> Care, Damaged Caregiver](<a href=“http://oldwww.nationwide.net/~taylorjh/damaged/]Damaged”>http://oldwww.nationwide.net/~taylorjh/damaged/)</p>
<p>I utterly respect her capabilities and efforts. She clearly could not reconcile her personal integrity and views with the realities of the medical complex (pharmaceutical and insurance too), its contradictions, and its fundamental shortcomings. I have sometimes wondered whether knowledge then of the following links might have changed her results if she had utilized some of the inexpensive therapeutic nutrition / biochemical approaches, below, to practice in a state with more medical freedoms.
[DoctorYourself.com</a> - Health, Naturally!](<a href=“http://doctoryourself.com/]DoctorYourself.com”>http://doctoryourself.com/)
[ScienceDirect</a> - Medical Hypotheses, Volume 70, Issue 5, Pages 905-1076 (2008)](<a href=“http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/03069877]ScienceDirect”>http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/03069877)
[Orthomolecular.org</a> - Journal Of Orthomolecular Medicine - Archives](<a href=“http://orthomolecular.org/library/jom/index.shtml]Orthomolecular.org”>Orthomolecular.org - Journal Of Orthomolecular Medicine - Archives)</p>
<p>One daughter, after a welcome reception at several top 10 and 20 medical schools, decided she was primarily interested in scientific research alone, at a top 10 grad school. One of her high school chums, NMSC National Merit Scholar and now magna cum laude from one of the Seven Sisters, has chosen to go into naturopathic medicine. The pharmacological basis of NDs, among many unconventional modalities, largely rests upon herbals and a different view of therapeutic nutrition.</p>
<p>Personally I think that there is a huge biochemical void between the MD specialties with patentable, molecular medicine vs consistent therapeutic nutrition of the NDs and the golden age of nutrient research in the 30s and 40s, perhaps best identified through all the smoke and fog by the MD-PhD successors to Pauling’s version of molecular medicine. (Pauling coined “molecular disease” and was variously called the father of modern chemistry, organic chem, and biochemistry in his day, laying the very foundations of conventional molecular medicine.)</p>
<p>If you (and any friends) will read and biochemically integrate all that, you may be the doctor of many peoples’ dreams, truly a “genie in the bottle”.</p>