Transferring from Dentistry to Medicine before 1st year starts

Hello.

I'm wondering how probable it would be to transfer from dentistry to medicine before I go into the first year of dentistry should I have a change of heart after a lot of thinking. Any help would be very appreciated.

Probably quite unlikely - I think they'd suggest taking a gap year and re-applying for medicine. Why do you want to transfer before you've even started?

Oh i don't want to transfer, I would just like to know if the options open. For me it's dentistry all the way, for countless reasons haha. Medicine appeals to me because it's broad and not focused on one part of the body, though I can't really get away from allure of performing surgery within an office.

Hi,

I'm a qualified dentist.

You will be surprised to find that if you choose to study Dentistry, you will be studying about most of the human budy in quite a significant amount of detail.

Medics and Dentists study pretty much the same things in the first couple years of university. However, Dentists then later 'specialise' in to studying the head and neck region.

So if your worry is that you will only study about the head and neck, then you are very wrong.

We agree. That's the beauty of medicine to me; while dentistry is a very isolated specialism of medicine (though new research is bridging the gap between overall health and oral health) Medicine is broad and has so much more to offer, especially with its variety of specialties, some of which offer great balances between surgery and medicine. Tbh, I like how dentistry is both very medical and surgical. End of the day it's about personality, I would never have to be on call like doctors are (maybe one year but never again), I get to be very hands on and intensely focused now and then, and I get to chill in an office essentially being the leader of the whole unit. It's not a bad deal and is very suited to my personality.

Hi,

Thanks. I know that much. Am I right in thinking that the underlying reason for learning about whole body is because of how much scope we have in prescribing drugs, which means it's important for us to know how it might affect someone's overall health, I.e. potential for interaction with other drugs or degenerative body parts?

You are very wrong in most of what you said

Dentistry has loads of specialities, this is a list of all recognised dental specialities in the UK:
Dental and Maxillofacial Radiology, Dental Public Health, Endodontics, Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, Oral Medicine, Oral Microbiology, Oral Surgery, Orthodontics, Paediatric Dentistry, Periodontology, Prosthodontics, Restorative dentistry, Special Care Dentistry.

Yes Medicine has more areas you can specialise in to, but it is not to say dentistry is limiting, because it isn't.

Also, you mentioned doctors being on call. There are many dentists who are on call and it is very common for dentists, or any division of dentistry (a specialist in a field of Dentistry) to be on call if they choose that job post. Similarly, not all doctors are on call, unless they choose a specific job post that requires them to be on call.

This is a huge factor yes. Pharmacology is a major subject in Dentistry.

This is not the only reason though. Unfortunately, a lot of it is just for the sake of learning (as with most degrees, most of what you learn you wont even need). This is the case with Medicine too.

Also, it's interesting to learn that not all doctors are on call. I imagine the majority of physician specialties require that doctors be on call. Personally if I were to do medicine, i would definitely like to do something more hands on, perhaps even neurosurgery since neuroscience is very interesting to me, if it's not neurosurgery then I would probably be a GP, but the prospect of being a GP doesn't appeal to me at all unless I'm dental one, whereby I would be performing complicated hands on surgery. At the end of the day, it's a matter of personality.

1st choice neurosurgery, 2nd choice...GP. Interesting preferences.