QUOTED: Two medical leaves due to alcohol

[NotAProgDirector]

Early in my first year of medical school I got arrested in the school dorms and subsequently entered a treatment program and was put on medical leave for one year. I went back to school and finished my first year, and then after almost two years of sobriety I slipped and self-reported and got put on another medical leave and went back to treatment. By the time I apply this next summer I will have 3 years of sobriety, but I still have those two glaring medical leaves early on in my med school career. Since the last medical leave I have gone completely straight through and have been an above average med student.

My question is: should I completely avoid referring to the 2 medical leaves in any residency applications. Should I address them briefly in my personal statement vaguely saying something about an illness that is now in remission according to my personal physician, or do I go all out and provide full disclosure, say it was an opportunity for growth, reaffirmed my love for medicine, etc.? How would PDs react to any of these 3 options?

I think you really don't have a choice, and this is why:

1. From a legal standpoint, there is no requirement to disclose the reasons for a medical leave. Your transcript / dean's letter will state that you took the leaves, of course. So, as you say, you could not mention it at all, or you could say it was due to a medical issue, or you could disclose it fully.

2. If you got into legal trouble in school, then it may be disclosed in your dean's letter, basically answering the question for you.

3. In any case, one of the questions on the application is whether there is any reason why you might have trouble getting a license. 3 years of sobriety is nice, but not enough to answer "no". So, I think you're going to need to disclose this here anyway. Else, programs could decide that you lied on your application.

So, bottom line is that I think you'll need to disclose it. There is no question that it's going to impact your application. This is an illness with a very high rate of relapse, and often poor insight (i.e. people start drinking and don't disclose that, figuring that they can "take care of it themselves"). PD's will worry that you'd be unreliable or perhaps dangerous, or will fail a drug test, or will not get licensed.

On the other hand, if you disclose and then state that you've been in a regular monitoring program, and will continue to do so for the entire length of the residency, and talk about how this has affected you, and how you will deal with it during residency (since residency is stressful, and many social situations may include alcohol, etc), it MIGHT be seen as a strength -- especially if someone in a leadership position has had a similar problem and overcome it.

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[ILikeSugar]

I would ask your dean's office what shows up in the dean's letter. If they mention two leaves of absences, the residency programs are definitely going to be very curious so you won't have much of a choice. I would start working on that personal statement ASAP.