Super Sarah

No, it does not take 12 years to gain an MD qualification at all and I don't know where you got that idea from?

Are you in the States or England?

If you are in the States, then you have to apply to med school after having taken the entrance exam for med school - I think it is either called MCAT or MCAD. You study in med school for 4 years, where you study all the normal things like medical sciences and pathology and then do rotations in Peds, ER, Surgery and such like. You then graduate med school with an MD and you then go onto to become an Intern and then a Resident. You can then get a Chief Residency and sometimes Fellowships are available if you want to specialise and then there are Attendings posts too. After med school you need to take the State Licencing exams before you can practice as a doc and you also need to be licenced in your speciality if you have one. You are now allowed to practice outside any State that you are not registered in.

In England the system is slightly different. You would spend 5 years in med school, as it is an undergraduate degree program, although a lot of med schools in Britain have developed courses that take only 4 years for people who already hold degrees with at least a 2:1 pass in a science subject. After this, you would then graduate with an MBBS or MBChB, an MBBChir (Cambridge), or whatever medical degree your chosen university awards. Following graduation, you get provisional registration with the General Medical Council and have to undertake a year as a houseofficer, normally in medicine and surgery and these are approved hospital posts. This is where you put all the clinical skills that you have learned in med school into practice under supervision. Following this year, you are then elegible for full registration with the GMC and you then go onto SHO posts and this is the time to start specialising if you want to. You then have full registration and can practice independently as a doctor. You then work your way up to Registrar, then Senior Registrar and ultimately a Consultant post. As an SHO, you work towards MRCP Parts 1 and 2. This is membership of the Royal College of Physicians and the first part if mostly theory, having to undertake a multiple-choice paper and the second part is the clinical part, where you are given patients to examine and arrive at a diagnosis. Most people fail this part more often than the Part 1.

After you are registered with the GMC you can practice medicine in any part of Britain, unlike the States, where you need to be licenced in the State where you want to practice. After taking MRCP, you can then take postgraduate exams that pertain to your speciality, like anesthesia or nephrology or whatever.

Anyway, it may take you up to 12 years to gain a Consultancy or an Attending post, but you will still be practicing as a doctor with an MD qualification. As I said, it will take you 4 years to graduate with the MD and then you just go on from there.

Hope this helps and good luck in your endeavors.