
For example all prostate cancers are being operated robotically in the entire USA. Due to the advancement of technology and financial strength in the US healthcare system, you get trained with the latest technology available for a particular disease. Even though these facilities are available in private hospitals, in India most of the Indian PG students are being trained in government hospitals.
It is because of the huge population of India that all the novel strategies cannot be used in government set ups of our hospitals. We all know that only less than half of the protocols that we read from our textbooks are being practically followed in our setting because of financial and resource constraints.So that you are a well-trained doctor after the end of residency. As a matter of fact, these regulatory bodies won’t even give residency training authorizations to programs which are not qualified enough, they send their residents to places other than their hospital to get training in sections that is lacking in their own hospital, like surgical residency programs send their residents to different hospitals for burns, transplant, pediatric surgery, trauma training if they don’t have enough cases in their own hospital.
For surgery, it means certain number of cases in a year, certain amount of hours spent in certain aspects of training. They make sure that every resident who is getting on board, is certified as a physician/surgeon and equal in every aspect of their training.
The residency program in USA is unified with central board authority (Graduate medical education accreditation), that means that your training will be uniform like all the other residents in the country. There are lots of advantages of getting trained in USA as a resident. This will help you make a good judgment because these things matter in the long term – whether you will be able to sustain yourself in a completely different country, miles away from your home, amidst a different culture, away from the delicious home-made food.Ī lot of doctors face stressful situations during their initial years of residency just because they start feeling homesick and their performance decreases, so make an early judgment about your blending into the atmosphere of USA.Īfter all the hard work, with four stressful exams, lots of invested money, time away from home, the unpredictable interview season and finally, the match day hot seat. By doing so, you are not investing much before deciding and you get to see all pros and cons.ĭuring your elective rotation for 3-4 months, you will familiarize with the US health care system, the American culture, living situation, the food you are going to eat and behavior of people towards you. The best thing, which a lot of my colleagues did, to make sure that USMLE is the right path for them is doing clinical electives in their internship before giving USMLE. This is a huge misconception, because unlike Indian PG, in which you just give an exam and get the seat of your choice, USMLE is way more different. Some students think that the Indian postgraduate entrance exam is extremely difficult and with all the reservations going on in India, it will be much easier to get a PG seat in USA. This may seem illogical to you at this time but in the long term, it matters, because it’s not everyone’s cup of tea to spend their life away from home and family. The only deciding factor according to me is: “How badly do you want to settle in USA”. The earlier you decide between these two options, the better it is for you in the long term. A lot of us swap several times, between these two completely different paths. Every medical student, during their medical school time comes around this question of whether to go for Indian PG or USMLE.