:). Nope. I watched one of them figure it out (I’ve had several IOL surgeries by a total of three different surgeons.), though he did use a computer calculator. I had an optometrist who had to try to fit me with special contact lenses. He did all the calculations (and there were quite a few) while writing with a pencil on paper and muttering numbers under his breath.
If you Google IOL (intra-ocular lens) calculations, you’ll see that it still comes down to math. The measurements of the corneal surface and myopia are provided by computers, but the calculations for IOL measurements are not. I guess there are too many variables.
About 5 years ago, someone I know who had a history of complicated corneal issues was blithely assured by the surgeon an IOL would be “a piece of cake.” After he removed her lens, he realized it was not, in fact, a piece of cake to determine the specifications of the artificial lens and left her lying there, lens-less, for two hours while he consulted with colleagues and did the math.
I think that the comparison here is to a lawyer, who is not good at math, or at least self admitted to not being.
A doctor doesn’t need to have a PHd in mathematics, but should have a good head for numbers. I’ve heard of mistakes where a dosage was off by an order of magnitude because someone punched in an extra (or not enough) zeros. You should be good enough at math to catch errors like that without having to use a calculator. I’m sure errors of that sort are caught before the procedure or dose is given far more often than they are missed, and we can thank the medical profession for requiring doctors to be good at math for that.
Compared to that, how good does a lawyer need to be at math?
So, the full statement should be, "If I were great at math, I’d be a physicist. If I were any good at math, I’d be a doctor. Since I can barely manage to count my billable hours, I’m a lawyer.
If we had to depend on docs’ math skills to detect prescribing errors it wouldn’t be pretty.
Fortunately, computerized data entry and software systems for detecting mistakes have reduced (but not entirely eliminated) problems such as erroneous dosages.
Of course there are computerized calculators for all of these things. And so you need to be good with math to be able to use those calculators.
Take those lens calculations, for instance. Some of the numbers you’ll be inputting can be either positive or negative. Since both are possible, the calculator needs to accept both, and not just do things like naively take the absolute value of all inputs. Get one of the signs wrong, and the final output will be wildly different. Do you understand the conventions well enough to get the signs right? Do you understand the purpose of the calculations well enough to recognize when you get an answer that’s absurdly wrong? When you do get something absurdly wrong, are you able to figure out where your mistake was and correct it?
Sticking my well-worn oar in the water here. Nurses are doing a lot of that catching of mistakes, its our job explicitly. Pharmacists do a vast amount of that too-also their explicit job.
Knowing the right dose of a medication generally depends on convention, not math. Paediatricians do more arithmetic than other specialties since those doses may depend on weight.
Most medical math has been simplified to basic formulas where you plug in the values.
In my undergraduate, I took something like ten math courses, most with the honours physics students. But most doctors could get by with high-school difficulty math. It just isn’t as important as the other stuff. A cardiologist understands a little bit about flow and fluids. Radiologists and ophthalmologists and orthopods understand what they need to. Researchers and people who design medical equipment might use a lot of math. But this isn’t what the lawyer is referring to.