How Long Do You Need To Study To Become an Osteopath?

When you are younger and your teacher in school asks what you and your classmates would want to be like when you grow up, you would notice how many of the others say that they want to be a doctor. Maybe you have had that same dream, too. You know very well that medicine is a field that one can enter only with the right mixture of intelligence and passion. It is a complicated industry, where people's lives are at stake all the time.

Over time, people have chased after and worked hard for that dream. You might say that there are so many doctors in the world right now. But you do not of course consider the medical industry as too crowded because of the various specializations that doctors focus on. One specialization that doctors have been increasingly considering is osteopathy. This entails a study time frame that is just as rigorous as the other specializations have.

If you want to become a doctor of osteopathy (DO), you need to have a bachelor's degree in a science course. This is usually a four-year course in biology, chemistry and physics. Upon passing the medical exam, you can enroll to another four-year osteopathy program. Of course, you must find a great medical school that offers the course and an impressive curriculum for it. The four-year osteopathy course is commonly divided into two, where the first half deals with the framework of the field and the other half is for actual clinical rotations.

Usually, after the four-year course, you would be required to undergo a year more of practical training where you would be allowed to observe and help out in an osteopathic clinic or hospital. If you decide to take on an even more specialized osteopathic field, then you are looking at two to three more years of training and studying.

Totaling all of the years you would have to spend studying osteopathy, you would find out that you are looking at 11 to 12 years of study. Considering this in terms of your age, you are bound to become a full-pledged osteopath when you reach your 28th birthday. That is, provided you start at 16. Training to become an osteopath is indeed long, difficult and costly. But if you look at your goal that awaits you at the end of the line, maybe it all is just worth the fight.