These rotations, which are required for all DO candidates, go beyond a student’s home institution. Examples include ambulance rides, autopsy suites, prisons, culinary medicine kitchens, organ procurement trips and aircraft crash simulations, the AAMC said in a Feb. 19 news brief.
NASA even offers an aerospace medicine clerkship, which provides students the opportunity to experience zero gravity as they study space medicine for four weeks.
Of the 15,000-plus away rotations on AAMC’s visiting student learning opportunities database, some include simulations on trauma events. Rescue simulations range from airplane crashes to rescuing a drowning patient.
For example, 26-year-old Eric Macaluso, DO, participated in a mock avalanche nighttime rescue operation and learned about wilderness medicine. Dr. Macaluso, now a family medicine resident at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland, Pa., spent a month in Colorado learning about hypothermia, plant toxicology and celestial navigation.
“This was one of the most meaningful experiences I had during all of med school,” Dr. Macaluso told AAMC.
Read more about how medical school curricula is changing here.
