No Walk in the Park.

Learning that you have met the bar with what the top evidence-based chiropractic school has termed sufficient for practice is both humbling and exhausting.  I am not alone when I say that it was luck that brought the results these past two weeks.

Exhaustion does weird things to your mental abilities when the pressure is high.  When your mind is telling you to rest and the school says differently, a battle begins.  The winner is determined by your ability to overcome the exhaustion.  It is these tests that determine if you are ready for practice because it does not matter if you are having a bad day that day.  You have to find the mental strength within to prove you are competent that day or you don't move forward.  The other scenario is that you pass the OSCE's but miss a few questions or stations in the process.  You will then have to schedule time to prove you know your stuff at a later date while continuing to move forward.  Either scenario is taxing because the workload in the clinic and the other classes is also significantly high.

In the next 10 months, we will be taken through the rigors of preparation for chiropractic practice.  To the outsider looking in, this may seem simple or miniscule compared to our medical counterparts but I assure you, this is no walk in the park.  Every waking moment is spent thinking about the next step that needs to be taken.  Our lives consist of pessimistic feedback and constant ridicule of everything we do and say.  We live under a microscope and are forced to subscribe to the model our school follows and if we screw up, we pay for it with our time and energy.  

In the end, we will be competent practitioners.  We will be able to recognize disease patterns and diagnose diseases typically only MD's spot.  The public doesn't know this though.  It seems that the only ones that do know this are the DC's who graduate from UWS or an equivalent school.  That is okay though.  We work hard and we will educate our patients and the public as to what we can and cannot do when the time comes.

For now, I and my peers must prep for a few exams coming up next week.

All for now