Physician Training: Step By Step

To become a fully qualified and trained physician requires a lot of time and effort. The process towards training to be a physician is not easy at all. You become a physician when you finish the required four years of college and four years in medical school. After this comes the residency and fellowship training in any particular field or specialty. This entire process may sometimes take four years. The training to become a physician is a never ending process and even after training, the physician needs to keep learning and training to keep practicing as a physician.

Training at Medical School To apply to most medical schools, you need to have completed at least four years in college. Although most medical schools require college graduation, some allow a combination of grad school and medical school. Medical schools in the United States offer degrees of four years. Out of these, two years include courses in basic science like:

* Anatomy * Neuroanatomy * Histology * Behavioral Science * Genetics * Pharmacology * Pathology

After this the medical student needs to complete two years of clinical sciences, where the student under supervision of fully trained physicians treats and observes patients. During these two years, students attempt specialties like:

* Pediatrics * General Surgery * Obstetrics and Gynecology * Family Practice * Emergency Medicine

Then the student can choose electives from more than fifty specialties like Orthopedic surgery, Plastic Surgery, Neurosurgery, Oncology, Cardiology, Nephrology, Neonatology and Endocrinology.

Medical students in the United States have to pass a National Board Exam. This exam is to ensure that the students have grasped basic and clinical sciences. After passing these exams and after having graduated from medical school, these students go in for residency training, the first year of which is commonly called internship.

Residency Training When the entire duration of medical school is almost coming to an end, the medical students get to choose their specialty for their residency training. There are 24 medical specialties recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties. These are:

* Allergy and Immunology * Anesthesiology * Dermatology * Emergency Medicine * Family Practice * General Surgery * Internal Medicine * Medical Genetics * Neurological Surgery * Nuclear Medicine * Obstetrics and Gynecology * Ophthalmology * Orthopedic Surgery * Pathology * Pediatrics * Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation * Plastic Surgery * Preventive Medicine * Psychiatry and Neurology * Radiology * Thoracic Surgery * Urology

The students can then be called Doctors, but they are not fully trained to practice medicine. They have to be supervised by physicians who are fully trained. The residency training or internship is conducted at special hospitals. The period of residency is the most difficult, with most of these trainee physicians working for more than 36 hours at a stretch without any sleep.

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