Sunday, January 23, 2011

Through the Eyes of a D.O.

This week we had James Aston speak to us. He is a fourth year student at PCOM, or the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. He provided some great insight about the whole D.O. way of medicine and also discussed what it is like to go the military route for med school. Mr. Aston discussed how D.O.s are trained not just in traditional medicine but also in the "manipulative" part of medicine, and in a lot of cases have more at their disposal when practicing then an allopathic trained physician. He emphasized that going D.O. vs M.D. is really up to the individuals preference and that you can have great success in either program.

One great example he gave about osteopathic treatment was that of using this technique in patients who have some type of infection in their body. To speed up the healing process, a D.O. can open up the patients lymphatic pathways through a manipulative procedure (which is all hands on and non-invasive) to allow the white blood cells to get to the area of infection faster and clean it up. He provided a few more examples that were very interesting as well.

We want to thank Mr. Aston for taking time out of his busy schedule and speaking to our club. He also gave us his contact information in case anybody wanted to ask him questions about D.O. training or the military experience through and after med school. His email is jbaJSA@gmail.com.

Next week we will have a primary care physician DR. Mark Baxter, MD speaking to our club. Hope to see you all there!

1 comment:

  1. Sounds like a great lecture, I am bummed I missed it - I am going to shoot him an e-mail right now

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