Just curious - What is the ultility of calculus for a medical doctor?
If nothing else, it’s a good weeding-out process.
Doctors don’t need calculus in their practice, but you would need a certain amount of calculus to learn how to be a doctor. For example, you would need calculus to analyze the amount of drug that would be present in a person’s bloodstream at a given time after administering the drug by considering the rate of absorption and the rate at which the drug is metabolized and excreted. In practice, a doctor would refer to published information instead of working the problem, but an understanding of calculus is necessary to know how the figures are initially determined. There would be other examples.
Pre-med calculus serves another important purpose in training doctors – it’s a way of identifying particularly intelligent people with good study habits, the kind of people who would do well in medical school. Along with organic chemistry and memorization-heavy biology courses, calculus is what I called a “So you want to be a doctor?” course. It may not provide future doctors with an essential skill they will need in their practice (although it does, as I said, form a basis for skills they will need), but it does encourage habits that are necessary to do well in medical school. Having courses like this is cruel to undergraduates, but it helps to ensure that students admitted to medical school (who are very expensive for the university to train) are likely to succeed. The same technique is used in introductory courses for other programs such as chemistry, engineering and computer science where the cost per student to the university is relatively high, in order to ensure that candidates are successful. If you’ve just started in such a program, bear in mind that it will actually become easier as time goes on. Once you pass the initial test, the material will become less difficult and you will be better able to handle it. (Also, contrary to what you might have been told, medical and graduate schools tend to consider lower-year marks less than upper-year marks, if at all. You should confirm this with schools you’re interested in, though, and don’t use it as an excuse not to try hard.)
ultrafilter: Exactly. =) These courses are not so much meant to test your intellectual ability to do calculus as they are meant to test your diligence and study habits. Anyone who does all the required material and asks for help when needed will do well. ‘Well’ means ‘above the average, which will almost always be a C+’. My college’s introductory course was designed like this, and it was also designed to identify people who might have unusual promise in math by making it extremely difficult to get an A+.
I used some calculus in pharmacology, and knowing what calculus is and what it does is useful in dealing with some medical statistics.
And just understanding how rates of changes over time actually work is useful in comprehending certain physiologic processes and disease states.
My radiologist friends told me they used calculus and physics a fair amount in their residencies, but do so far less often once in actual clinical practice.
Epidemiologists seem to use it more.
So, I’d say while not necessary, an understanding of calculus is helpful for a deeper understanding of medicine than is possible without it. Besides, one enters medical school with many, many options available. Some of which do need calculus. Why cut oneself off from a lot of future choices by not mastering the basics?
But how is a calculus course a better “weeding out” method than having some challenging medicine-related course? It seems that this ignores the notion of multiple intelligences . . . can’t someone be a great doctor while being terrible at math?
Somehow, I’m not comforted by the idea of a doctor writing prescriptions or interpreting test results who is terrible at math.
Qadgop said:
Similar sentiment here, although not so specific to medicine. While I made it through my (three?) semesters of Calculus (forever, to our eternal amusement, listed in the UT course guide as Calculus and Anal Geometry), Linear Algebra and finally bailed out of Finite Derivatives (not a required course for me), and I haven’t actually made a pencil-borne assault on a calculus problem in twenty years (although I do a lot of back-of-the-envelope geometry), it’s been quite useful to know what to expect from letting the software do it for me.
Having an understanding of rates of change, and relative rates of change has allowed me to put to good use the same software that I see misused by other folks.
Besides it being a good weeder-out as described above, I think my exposure was worth it although I’ve admittedly grown quite rusty in performing the calculations myself.
Organic Chemistry was a similar regimen, both in that it served as a good weeder-out (I liked the first semester so much that I took it again 
) and just having had to understand the basic mechanisms for a year or so has been beneficial, although I’d by now sure hate to take a crack at the naming conventions.