Aetherus

While your situation is unfortunate, I think your expectation of clerkship are not in line with reality. Your rotation will never teach you what you need to know to pass the NBME, you need to study on your own after your work day. Surgical rotations are very service based, you will learn the bread and butter clinical presentations by being part of the team. The true medical knowledge will come from self studying. This is true of any level of training, you cannot expect people to teach you everything you need to know. If your surgical weeks were only 50-60 hours, your rotation is pretty light f

Interesting, I was not aware this was a thing. Do you know if CARMS keeps the documents from previous cycles?

As a Carms reviewer for one of the most competitive specialities I can guarantee this is not the case for every program. As someone who has reviewed over a hundred applications, I can tell you that very little weight is put on the MSPR. There is so much variability between schools that it is impossible to assess properly. I agree that red flags on the MSPR are not good, but otherwise, I wouldnt worry too much. Make sure you do your best because medicine is a small community and words gets around (good or bad). I think most reviewers realize that the MSPR is out of your control in terms of the

Some people choose to include their score. I don't think this is necessary and really would only help your application if you did particularly well and are applying to a competitive specialty. Otherwise no one knows your score or really cares about it.

Honestly if you have graduated from a Canadian Medical School, you don’t have to study much. I read through/skimmed Toronto notes and looked at my slides from preclerkship/clerkship. I studied for a week and it was more than enough.

The misinformation on this thread is significant. Neuro-Ophthalmology is a fellowship that can be entered from both Ophthalmology or Neurology. It is no considered a competitive subspecialty to enter as there are generally more spots than applicants, although almost all programs are offered in the USA. Neuro-Ophthalmology focuses on the treatment of Afferent and Efferent disorders of the Eye-Brain Axis. The bread and butter things you will see are Optic Neuropathies, Disc Oedema, Strabismus, Nerve Palsies etc. You will not be managing glaucoma macular degeneration etc as a Neuro-Oph

There is no doctor shortage, there is only a misuse of funds and a poor distribution of resources. There is no point in increasing Medical School positions as there is already a shortage of residency positions and a shortage of jobs in certain areas. Furthermore, we don’t need more doctors in major centres, we need them in the remote communities and it is hard to get people to stay long term to provide care. There are many things the government is mishandling in this pandemic, but medical school positions is not one of them.

It takes years to train physicians. It takes 4 years of training (ie medical school) before you are of any use to the system. No premed would be able to meaningfully impact patient care from a medical aspect in time for this pandemic. Furthermore, the main problem with man power is a funding issue from the governmental level and not a shortage of doctors.

Much of CARMS is about the narrative. You will need a good one to explain to the committee how you went unmatched for one of the most competitive specialities and in your year off pivoted to another uber competitive speciality. I think doing the 3 Derm electives will make it very hard to demonstrate your commitment to Ophthalmology and your previous record will make derm programs sceptical as well. Not to mention the illusion that you are chasing the most lucrative specialities in Medicine. I would strongly recommend applying to family medicine as a backup. As mentioned, you will be able to do

I think these are two separate issues. I’m not talking about residency equivalence which determines if your residency training is considered equivalent but talking about if your medical degree is recognized in the state you are working in. You are correct that there are certain discrepancy in residency training that restricts your ability to practice certain specialities with canadian training. I think you are confounding doing the USMLE to get a H1b visa instead of a J1 which in certain states requires the USMLE (Florida is one that comes to mind). However getting an H1b visa and having your

My understanding is that the LMCC having two parts to parallel the American Exam is required to have our training considered equivalent to the US training. I think having this equivalence is nice for portability, but is especially important in terms of optics during contract negotiations. Having an easy way out of Canada puts pressure on the government during negotiations and helps us get better contracts.

Stethoscopes are pretty much just a fashion accessory. I don’t think it’s ever worth upgrading your stethoscope unless you are a cardiologist or have a lot of disposable income.

The MSPR serves almost no role at all. Purely there to look for red flags. Every school has such a different MSPR that’s it’s useless to use to compare applicants. Electives, research and connections are way more important.

Genetics and Pediatric subspecialties come to mind as requiring a good grasp of embryology. Most surgical specialties will have a pediatric subspecialty that are generally heavy on embryology. Most congenital malformations can be traced back to embryology. That being said, embryology for the most part is not directly relevant to clinical practice.

GIM is also either 1 or 2 years depending if you go through the Carms GIM fellowship or just extend your internal residency by 1 year. I believe cardiac surgery is also 6 years.