I am currently looking to see if veterinary assistant experience should count as clinical experience for medical school. I have worked at my dads veterinary clinic for the past 6 years and have done everything from running chemistry panels to manually breathing oxygen during a coding surgery patient to administering medication to hospitalized patients. I have shadowed a physician a couple of times and have noticed a lot of overlap between the professions. However, a professor at the medical school that is my first choice said that this would not count and I should not list it as clinical experience. I understand that these are not humans, but the concepts of the care are largely the same.
Hi! From all of my experience speaking with pre-med advisors and listening to a lot of pre-med advice forums, I’d say this is not clinical/medical. Likewise, I’m a standardized patient. So I’m a “fake patient” for medical and nursing students. The type of interactions, the things I’ve had to memorize and learn, are mirror images of actual patient-physician interactions. But at the end of the day, we aren’t interacting with actual patients. If you want to be a physician for humans, then the same logic applies. And I’d rather be safe than sorry. If you apply, and list this as medical/clinical and it isn’t, med schools may see it as you trying to cheat them for hours. If you list it as nonmedical/clinical and it is, then med schools would give you additional “points” as needed, if that makes sense. They’d see that you mislabeled it and keep that in mind (or so we hope lol).
Your vet med experience will not count as clinical experience for medical schools. You can include it on your app if you want to (you can leave it off of your application as well) but it won’t supplement for real clinical experience with human patients.
thanks! i don’t know if they counted it due to Covid, or if i did well in other areas, but I just got accepted recently. thanks for the feedback!