Faq

[yasana]

put your question here ??

and i will start with mine

im not fluent english speaker ,, will that make me fail ??

[Scottish Chap]

put your question here ??

and i will start with mine

im not fluent english speaker ,, will that make me fail ??

You do not mention your level of training and I'm not sure what you mean by "make me fail", but the U.S. certainly puts several road blocks in the way for people who want to practice medicine here without a firm command of the English language. Here are some:

1. At the premedical level. The Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) is a rigorous exam that is used for the purposes of medical school admission. I am a native English speaker who (modestly speaking) did very well in the British education system. This exam is no joke, with rapid-fire university level chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, biology, and brick-hard verbal reasoning questions. Performance on this exam mandates VERY good command of the English language.

2. At the medical school level. More of the same. The USMLE examinations are 8 and 9-hour long exams and the NBME subject shelf exams dictate that you decipher information rapidly from huge amounts of data, and answer questions in less than one minute. For a non-native English speaker, this is challenging.

3. At the licensing level. Before leaving medical school in the U.S. or before being eligible to apply for residency positions in the U.S. (for foreign doctors), the USMLE Step 2 CS exam is a 9-hour practical examination taken in the U.S. on standardised patients (actors) to assess your ability to extract patient information, process it, and diagnose disease, then relay that to patients and convey your plan on paper. Although this exam has a 99% first-time pass rate for U.S. medical students, I've worked with plenty of international doctors who failed this exam multiple times after doing well on the written exams. The NBME will never admit it but, by conjecture, many believe this exam was created to weed out non-native English speakers who cannot communicate with patients.

4. At the practice level. The American public is VERY intolerant of doctors who cannot make themselves understood and doctors who do not understand patients. I am a native English speaker with an accent and, trust me, even this can be an issue. The U.S. has all kinds of offices like the patient relations department, the department of health etc. where difficult doctors can be anonymously reported.

Overall, it's important to have a good command of English to practice medicine in the U.S. I hope that helps.

[yasana]

thanx so much ,, i really appreciate this detailed, informitive reply