You asked. So here are my thoughts on how osteopathic medical students should respond to the NBOME.

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Look, even before the Step 2 CS cancellation, my DMs and email were flooded with messages from osteopathic medical students who are fed up with the NBOME.

There is *real* anger toward this organization. Honestly, more than I even heard about from MD students and the NBME.
The question is, will that sentiment translate into action?

Amorphous anger on social media is easy to ignore. But if that anger gets channeled into organized efforts to facilitate change, then improvements are possible.
This much should be clear: begging the NBOME to reconsider their Level 2-PE exam is a waste of your time.

Best case scenario, you’ll get another “town hall” meeting, a handful of platitudes, and some thoughtful beard stroking before being told that they’re keeping the exam.
Instead of complaining to the NBOME, here are a few things that are more likely to bring about real change.
1) Vote with your wallets: take USMLE Step 3.

Almost all states allow DO licensure by completing the USMLE series. If you aren’t required to engage with the NBOME, don’t.
2) Lobby the state boards that don’t allow the USMLE.

As an MD who has passed the USMLE, I could practice in any state. Why shouldn’t a DO who passed the USMLE be able to do the same?

(State boards that prop up the NBOME with a COMLEX requirement are listed in the Tweet below.) https://t.co/stace4lMjD
If you intend to practice in one of these states, talk to your state representative. Explain how the medical board is providing a deterrent to DOs serving patients in their state.

The board may be friendly with the NBOME, but they’re still accountable to the legislature.
3) Lobby the AOA to change the COCA accreditation requirements that compel schools to require COMLEX-USA.

It’s ultimately the COCA requirement that keeps the NBOME in business.
The AOA is the professional body ultimately responsible for securing the success of the osteopathic profession.

They should think carefully about whether, at this point in history, a “separate but equal” licensing exam hurts DOs more than it helps.

https://t.co/pFwaAx01oB
As a sidenote:

The LCME’s accreditation standards for MD schools are more stringent than COCA’s for COMs - and even they never mandated the USMLE.

(Still, most schools did - since the requirement gave access to student loans to cover registration fees).

Let the schools decide.
Last thing:

Don’t feel guilty about pursuing these tactics. None of them are underhanded. Market forces and political action are how things are supposed to work in America - and they’ll be needed to move an entrenched, monopolistic bureaucracy that ignores its constituents.

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An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
The outrage is not that she fit better. The outrage is that she stated very firmly on national television with no caveat, that there are no conditions not improved by exercise. Many people with viral sequelae have been saying for years that exercise has made them more disabled 1/


And the new draft NICE guidelines for ME/CFS which often has a viral onset specifically say that ME/CFS patients shouldn't do graded exercise. Clare is fully aware of this but still made a sweeping and very firm statement that all conditions are improved by exercise. This 2/

was an active dismissal of the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of patients with viral sequelae. Yes, exercise does help so many conditions. Yes, a very small number of people with an ME/CFS diagnosis are helped by exercise. But the vast majority of people with ME, a 3/

a quintessential post-viral condition, are made worse by exercise. Many have been left wheelchair dependent of bedbound by graded exercise therapy when they could walk before. To dismiss the lived experience of these patients with such a sweeping statement is unethical and 4/

unsafe. Clare has every right to her lived experience. But she can't, and you can't justifiably speak out on favour of listening to lived experience but cherry pick the lived experiences you are going to listen to. Why are the lived experiences of most people with ME dismissed?

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