Hey guys,

I’ve seen a number of posts about people struggling with their DO acceptances and feelings of inadequacy, so I wanted to share something that I’ve been thinking about with respect to DOs. I started thinking about this when my partner’s mother died a few years ago to a preventable disease because she denied treatment out of distrust of allopathic medicine. After her disease became terminal, she only saw DOs for her end-of-life care and felt she was more heard by them.

As our society continues to become more and more anti-science and medically-hesitant, I think that DOs are in a unique position to win over the trust of patients with what many perceive to be a more “holistic” medical education. I think many patients see DOs as a sort of intermediary between holistic and allopathic medicine, and for many that may mean they’ll actually listen to a DO.

While obviously the degrees are the same and I hope that ultimately they merge into one, I think that for the time being DOs have the unique potential to leverage their degree in an increasingly anti-science world to reach a broader swath of people than MDs can, simply because of public perception about the degree.

All medical professionals you’ll ever work with will see you as the same as an MD. But there will be patients who will trust you more because of your degree, not in spite of it. And in building trust with those patients, you’ll be helping to build back a broader sense of trust in science and medicine, which we REALLY need right now.

Maybe this isn’t helpful, but it’s something I’ve seen in action and which I’ve been thinking about lately as I ponder how we pull society back from the brink of the dark ages.