Do osteopathic medical students maintain their osteopathic identity in a dually accredited training hospital system?

Abstract

Given the unprecedented growth of the osteopathic profession in the past few decades, osteopathic clinical education has been turbulent. Maintaining a unique osteopathic professional identity during the years of clinical training has been difficult because of limited DO preceptors, time constraints, and the hesitancy of MD preceptors to embrace osteopathic tenets as well as manual medicine. Our objective was to delineate student feelings about sustaining their osteopathic uniqueness in a “dually accredited” system and the ability of this system to meet the needs of osteopathic students.