re: Are dentists real doctors?

It's not simply a matter of which is harder - dental school requires excellence in hand skills from the very start, whereas that aspect doesn't become a necessity in medical school until surgical rotations. There are some extremely intelligent people who can handle the book work of dental school, but who fail miserably at the hands-on stuff. Some people just aren't cut out for it.

Yeah, we had 3 that busted out in 1st yr. They throw you right into waxing dental anatomy and cutting cl 2 preps on typodonts all the while you are in gross anat, neuro, & biochem among the other 10 little classes all going on simultaneously.

You can skip out of a basic science lecture and grab the notes or tape from a friend or service. But there is no skipping out of the pre-clinical labs. Good times..

This too...bridge preps are killing me now and now I'm too far to back out.

Not likely. Those people are a good mix of smart and skilled. OMFS is a tough gig. I don't envy them.

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This...I really don't think anyone who did well enough in dental school to get in OMFS would struggle to pass med school.

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Not only that, but they get to go to med school after 4 years of professional-school-level sciences with the added bonus of only requiring a Pass after having gotten to where they are by being in the top quartile in the vast majority of cases. Their newfound ability to slouch and perform in the bottom 10%, should they choose to with no ill effects on their outcome, graduation, or job prospects, really doesn't make them great for comparing the two, despite being the best at being able to do so.


Neither is harder. Not everything in life is tiered and ranked. They're both challenging in very similar ways with their own unique characteristics mixed in here and there. They both put you in position to be paid for your opinion and, in almost all fields, some amount of physical manipulation/cutting/sewing after an amount of training that is deemed adequate to perform those duties at a very high level. MDs offer a much more diverse overall healthcare approach upon graduation, with every graduate having demonstrated enough basic knowledge to identify and treat life-threatening emergencies from both medical (drugs given during heart attack, stroke, anaphylaxis, etc) and procedural (exposure and enough understanding that they should be able to confidently attempt an intubation, chest tube, etc if in dire need) standpoints. DDS graduate essentially practice-ready with a more limited, focused amount of specialized skills that no other group possesses. Neither of those is any better than the other. Essentially everyone would likely prefer one to the other. It's little more than personal choice.