Our guest today, Gina Moses, is the Director of Admissions at New York Institute of Technology’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. Prior to taking this position in 2016, she worked for almost ten years as the Associate Director of Recruitment and Application Services for the American Association of College of Osteopathic Medicine. Gina also worked in different admissions capacities for Georgetown and for the University of Maryland before starting at AACOM and after earning her masters in Higher Ed Administration from USC.

Can you give us an overview of NYIT COM's program with a focus on the more distinctive parts? [2:00]

One unique thing is the technology aspect to the program. We are probably one of the only medical schools in the nation outside of MIT that has it. The nice thing is that the program blends state of the art technology into the curriculum. With our new campus at Arkansas University we are synchronizing lectures between campuses and even with interviews.

Can you discuss the specific focus and strength of osteopathic medicine and NYIT? [3:19]

The beauty of osteopathic medicine is that it is founded and grounded in the philosophical approach, which makes it so distinctive. This philosophy came about from Andrew Taylor Still in the 1800s. He was a physician, and tragically his children died. This made him recognize there was a disconnect in medical training, and that the traditional training of the time was not effective and often harmful. He felt that medicine needed to be practiced in a more holistic manner, where structure and function are interrelated. So if you break your arm it puts pressure on different points that it wouldn’t otherwise do. Osteopathy is a way of looking at the body to aid in it healing itself. When we train osteopathic physicians we are taking history and philosophy and infusing it into the curriculum in the first two years. Students at NYIT gain 200 hours in those first two years in anatomy and physiology in the musculoskeletal system, which comes together throughout lecture and case-based training but also in hands-on doing. That is the power of osteopathic medicine.

With all this amazing training, the beauty in 21st century medicine is that if you have a sinus infection, an osteopath can palpate your sinuses, head, forehead, neck, shoulders, and lymph nodes to help your body in the healing process - moving fluids around, enabling the body to breathe better, and improving the functionality and flow. It is a wonderful way of looking at medicine.

Palpation or manipulation is very low tech. Why would NYIT pursue this more philosophical approach? [6:31]

At the end of the day we are an osteopathic medical school that provides the best state of the art technology with robotics, so students can work with “patients” through robotics and not do any harm. We are able to look at cadavers online and use technology to see things you might not see when you have an actual cadaver in front of you, since we are not all created the same internally. We infuse state of the art telemedicine, providing healthcare to remote locations, and also when working with patients in front of you with non-invasive, cost effective care, working with the body’s immunology to promote self-healing and not going to a prescription or an opiate because we’ve seen what can happen with over-prescription. In the general public, across the spectrum in healthcare, people are concerned about the cost of it, the cost of pharmaceuticals,