This is just something that I have wondered about. I checked out the requirements many, many years ago, and it looked like you really needed several courses in calc to qualify for med school admission.
No, I’m not a failed doctor-wannabee or anything, I investigated a LOT of professions when I was in high school, that’s all.
But I never could quite get my brain around the calculus requirement. Do you really USE this in practice? Or is it somehow necessary to understanding some aspects of medicine along the way?
I didn’t post in GQ because I think there is probably no definitive answer, but if I’ve erred, Mods please feel free to move the thread.
Learning is not about whether the subject is practical or not. But calculus is also used in some of the chemistry and biology courses that make up part of a pre-med program.
Well, calculus was handy in med school when dealing with optics (necessary to understand radiology or opthalmology, IF you want to go into radiology or opthalmology) and also very helpful in understanding pharmacology and statistics. It’s also needed if one is going to do basic science research, and some clinical research.
Basically while your average clinician doesn’t need much calculus, med schools really don’t want to limit their students’ future career choices. IMHO.
Besides, I always found that understanding ventilation/perfusion pulmonary physiology, and acid-base renal failure problems used the same part of my brain as understanding calculus used.
Most Med schools may well feel that if a student can’t grasp calculus, they’ll have difficulty with certain vital aspects of pathophysiology. That was certainly the feeling at Johns Hopkins, when I was on the admissions committee there (student member, cool experience!)
QtM, who has used calculus more than once as a primary care physician.
I sincerely thank you both for the insight and practical reasons for this. Seriously, I had no clue and was asking—and I got my questions answered very, very well.
[thumbs up] Thank you, I really mean it! [/thumbs up]
When people think that they’ll only need X Math (or whatever) in their career, they try to avoid learning X+1 Math. Which means they end up keeping about X-10 Math in their heads. If you learn Calculus, you should be pretty good at a whole lot of useful stuff needed in Calculus.
It can be a great filter. If you’re no good at any Math, you have no hope of making it thru Calculus.
And yes, Calculus is absolutely postively amazing in a wide range of fields in and of itself. The problem is, most people don’t know it when they have a problem that Calculus would be good for since they don’t know Calculus.
Exactly. Calculus isn’t a stupidly simple subject by any means but a number of its concepts are quite eloquent. A large number of the physiology and biology situations that I’ve come across as an undergrad are difficult to describe without some concepts from calculus.
It would be cool if we made the subject a little less frightening to the population if we left out some of the difficult calculational parts and started introducing it a lot earlier, perhaps even in grade school, and built up the calculational difficulty along with the algebra skills.