With $10,000 in prizes, history bureau’s essay contest targets five core principles

To encourage osteopathic medical students, interns and residents to study their profession’s past struggles and achievements, the AOA Bureau of Osteopathic History and Identity is conducting its sixth annual history essay competition.

As it has done since 2006, the bureau will bestow up to three awards: a $5,000 first prize, a $3,000 second prize and a $2,000 third prize.

The bureau is asking contestants to focus their essays on the bureau’s “Core Principles for Teaching the History of Osteopathic Medicine.” For the 2010 essay competition, the bureau has chosen five different core principles than those used in 2009 and those used in 2008. Because the bureau has 20 core principles, it is rotating them so that the competition focuses on different ones each year.

“By focusing on a few core principles each year, the bureau has made the competition truly competitive,” says William T. Betz, DO, who has chaired the Bureau of Osteopathic History and Identity since 2006. “Contestants know up front that other students, interns and residents are likely to submit essays on the same topics, motivating them to write the best essays they can.

“An added benefit of changing the core principles each year is that the competition remains fresh for repeat contestants.”

The five principles selected for the 2010 competition are as follows:

Core Principle 6. The struggle for defining osteopathy’s scope of practice and the respective intellectual positions of those who favored broad and narrow scopes of practice. (In developing its core principles, the bureau used the term osteopathy to refer to the profession during the period in which most DOs practiced strictly manipulative medicine.)

Core Principle 7. The eventual transformation of osteopathy into osteopathic medicine.

Core Principle 9. The political efforts of DOs to obtain equal licensure provisions and equal treatment with MDs under the law.

Core Principle 14. The U.S. Department of Education’s and the former Council on Postsecondary Accreditation’s decisions to recognize AOA accreditation of medical colleges.

Core Principle 16. The factors leading to and the consequences of DOs being admitted to the uniformed services as physicians and surgeons.

“The bureau is seeking in-depth and original investigation on these principles,” Dr. Betz explains. “We hope that contestants uncover and study long-forgotten documents, talk with surviving witnesses of earlier times, and produce essays that reveal previously unexplored aspects of the profession’s history.”

Peer-reviewed judging

As in the past five years, this year’s entries will undergo peer-review judging by members of the Bureau of Osteopathic History and Identity shortly after the competition’s Sept. 13 deadline for entries.

Depending on the quality and quantity of the entries, the history bureau will award prizes to up to three authors. The winning authors will be honored during the AOA’s 115th Annual Osteopathic Medical Conference and Exposition, which will be held Oct. 24-28 at The Moscone Center in San Francisco.

In addition to honoring the winners at the AOA conference, the history bureau will encourage all contestants to submit their essays to the AOA for consideration by JAOA—The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association and The DO. The essays of those contestants who do so may end up undergoing the JAOA’s own peer-review process.

“While the AOA is not guaranteeing that the JAOA and The DO will publish essays from the history competition, just experiencing the JAOA’s peer-review process would be rewarding for authors,” promises AOA Editor in Chief Gilbert E. D’Alonzo Jr, DO.