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Should Organic Chemistry Be a Premed Requirement?
1-quack-4-malpractice writes "For the second time, the Wall Street Journal health blog has questioned whether premed students should be forced to suffer through organic chemistry. Dozens of doctors weighed in with comments, and many of them seem to think that the wry subject is an almost useless rite of passage. Wired Science points out that there are not enough doctors who do research in addition to seeing patients, and they are the ones who benefit most from a thorough grounding in basic sciences like organic chemistry."
Reminds me of the classic joke:
A college physics professor was explaining a concept to his class when a pre-med student interrupted him.
"Why do we have to learn this stuff?" he blurted out.
"To save lives," the professor responded before continuing the lecture.
A few minutes later the student spoke up again. "Wait-- how does physics save lives?"
The professor responded. "By keeping idiots out of medical school."
For working in that army of Java and .NET developers that drives the industry, do you really need to understand anything beyond basic algebra? Why burden CS students with silly classes when they won't even need to know what an integral is? I think it's a scam perpetrated by the academic industry to force us to pay for more credits and more books.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
For a real researcher, you probably need to know a large amount of organic and then lots of biochem. If you don't want to be a researcher, it probably doesn't do much. Maybe splitting it up into multiple kinds of doctors would be a solution.
Short answer: no.
Do engineers need differential equations? Hell no, only Maple or Mathematica and the ability to translate differential equations into Maple or Mathematica Syntax, then apply the answers to what they're doing.
Leave the miles-long blackboard scrawlings to the mathematicians.
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...it should be a highschool requirement.
What the hell is happening to our education?
Medical costs have been growing at a far far faster rate than inflation. Clearly, demand for doctors is outstripping supply by a lot. We really need to lower the artifical barriers to entry to practicing medicine, such as unnecessary classwork.
And before you jump up and down screaming "I want only the best of the best to be doctors!" I should remind you that many people don't have access to any doctors at all, and a B-student doctor is just as capable as an A-student doctor at determining whether your sore throat needs further medical care.
We just plain need more doctors.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Is organic chemistry grimly humerus? Or twisted out of shape - perhaps into a boat or a chair? Is the skew E- or Z-? D- or L-? That's the important thing.
If it's not Orgo, it'll be something else. Gotta have something that separates the unwashed masses from those with some chance of making med-school. And, as chemistry courses go, it's more a memorization than a "physics/math" course and so more applicable to the kind(s) of things covered in med school (from what I can tell).
The fact that it can toast "real" chem majors caught in the crossfire can be dealt with (and was, in my case).
Overall the average doc is not a bad critter. But as times change, the drugs change as do their interactions. Organic chem gives the ability to the doc to understand HOW these drugs interact. In particular, when looking at the PDR and seeing the struct, it is possible for a doc to think about what they are seeing in patients, possibly with other drugs.
In the end, an MD with organic is like the difference between CS vs. MIS. MIS teaches the current tech. It gives somebody a CURRENT job. CS teaches principles to allow that person to adopt and change and get future jobs. An MD with Organic Chem will adopt better to knew methods and new diseases (think prions which were unknown in the industry just 25 years ).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I don't see why. In fact, I don't see why we require premedical students to take chemistry at all, or even biology, for that matter. Come to think of it, what is the point of requiring a bachelor's degree in order to pursue an MD- the two are only tangentially related. Why not make the MD degree a trade certificate, something perhaps akin to a license to drive a truck? That way we could confine the premedical curricula to only those topics students really need to know on a daily basis as mature, practicing, guts 'n' glory clinicians.
Nah, forget it. I think the desire to help people and a positive attitude should be all that it takes to get into med school.
Or maybe if you're going to be practicing a science, you should understand it.
Just like CS students should have to have Cal II and III and Diffy-Q and assembler.
Too many things are dumbed-down too much already. I'm sorry if you're too dumb to learn organic chem or assembler or higher maths... Too damn bad. We don't want you. Go be a project/product manager or an assembly line worker. We don't need you here.
I wouldn't feel comfortable if my doc didn't know how to make his own LSD.
It should be a highschool requirement...
What the hell is happening to our education?
In addition, to understand some of the biological and molecular aspects of disease an understanding of the sciences is absolutely vital. Otherwise physicians may as well be glorified plumbers (surgeons come to mind, but I digress... ;) )
While medicine is sometimes (rarely) an art rather than a science, the fundamentals are inherently scientific and need to be taught more rather than less.
I find myself coming back to chemistry as an engineer, voluntarily or involuntarily, at various points. It's intermittently important to understand how the devices I'm using work, but still important.
I'd say it's necessary to have a good understanding of the underlying basic science if you're an applied scientist.
Speaking as a current medical student, I absolutely think that Organic Chemistry is an appropriate pre-med subject. While the material covered isn't particularly useful beyond establishing a solid basis for understanding the chemistry of biochemical pathways, the value of O-Chem is that it's usually the first time an undergrad student is hit by a tidal-wave of information. O-Chem, just like a lot of the stuff in med school, isn't necessarily difficult stuff; the challenge lies in assimilating information and understanding relationships at a high rate. O-Chem was an excellent primer for the drinking-from-a-firehose atmosphere of medicals school, as well as a good tool to test scientific critical thinking on the MCAT.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
I have a doctor who couldn't pass organic chemistry. We call them "nurse practitioners". Sure, they aren't formal doctors, but they'll see me.
Here are some great follow-up examples:
Why on earth should engineering majors study optics, when so few will work with optics?
Why should a computer science major study operating systems, when scant few of them will actually work on an operating system?
Why should English majors study poetry, when so few will become poets?
Why should Business majors study economics, when so few will actually become economists?
Why should a home owner buy fire detectors, when so few will have their house burn down?
Why should people buy the Journal, when it publishes such stupid crap?
I go to the University of Florida right now. We're decent for a public school, and our medical program is actually pretty good. Some prereqs apply to Premed and all of the Engineering majors, so when I started here I had some classes with premeds.
For example, Calc 1 was extremely difficult. Plus, the rude teacher (one of the course coordinator's bitches) was bad at his job. With outside tutoring, I managed to scrape by. I think Calc is important for most majors, even premed, so this might not be the best example. However, the class shrunk as the year went on. Doing Calculus was difficult, but I can only assume less difficult than being a full time, life saving doctor. It's a good thing that these people got weeded out. Plus, it taught people like me to work harder to actually make it.
What am I trying to get to with all this rambling? I think difficult weed outs are good for the earlier part of your college career. Most premeds won't use Organic. But, they need to prove they can work hard towards a difficult subject early on. Otherwise, the resources go to waste. And as an added benefit, the people who do make it by these weed outs usually gain work ethic from the experience.
They all hate it anyway, and show no interest in the subject, ruining the class for people who are actually interested in orgo. Put both parties out of their misery and stop requiring premeds to take orgo.
Wait, wait, Organic Chemistry... for people WANTING TO BE DOCTORS, humm... I wonder if the two subjects have anything in common...
I just hope their poor minds are not stressed with the subject during college, I mean...
how long until
Is o-chem all that bad? I was a math major, but I had to suffer through it due to my degree being a Bachelor of Science, so I actually ended up taking both organic and inorganic chemistry.
But even though I managed through it somehow, all I remember was that we played "name that molecule" and had to come up with "characteristic" reactions that were almost all inaccurate to some degree.
Oh well. At least I know why there are numbers and commas at the front of so many molecule names! They tell you where the other bits attach. But as far as it being a good weed-out class, I'm less sure.
There were MUCH harder weed-outs out there, like that incredibly evil numerical analysis class. Everybody thought the guy who scored a 50% was some kind of genius and the professor was sometimes reduced to giving partial credit for essay answers to math questions explaining what I thought I was supposed to do if only I had something better than a vague idea of what the hell I was doing and how to manipulate that stupid equation into something I could take a Taylor expansion of at some point in such a way that you could extract an error term.
Hell, that last paragraph would probably be worth 10% on a test...
There are plenty of programs where calculus is required, but not really used. It seems to be used as an arbitrary winnowing mechanism. Maybe organic chemistry is the same.
It seems to me that, given the soaring cost of health care, the industry needs to be released from the artificial scarcity of qualified professionals driven by gate-keeping organizations such as the AMA. For most routine medical care we don't need people who have gone through the excruciating and expensive process of four years of medical school followed by the hazing of residency.
Of course surgeons, medical researchers, oncologists and other highly specialized professionals will need the full training that all doctors get now -- but how often does the general public need their services, and how many people with that amount of training do we we really need to provide quality health care for everybody?
It's already happening in some respects. I get almost all my routine medical care from PAs (physicians' assistants) and nurses and very rarely actually see an MD. The process should be expanded IMO.
If you RTFA, and not really in depth, but just the title and author, and the website it was posted on, you'll see that this was posted by one Jacob Goldstein writing on the Wall Street Journal BLOG. So, this is clearly an op-ed piece of some sort. The thing I have to ask Mr. Goldstein is, does he have children? What ages? Did one of his kids recently not get into med school because he flunked O-chem? With all the talk about "helicopter parents" and the dumbing down of education these days, it wouldn't in the least bit surprise me if this was written by such a person who wants to lower the standards so their precious little snowflake can get into medical school to make his $2 million,...
I've never heard organic chemistry described as a "wry subject" before.
I can't believe that pre-meds are whining about o-chem. Organic was cake compared to p-chem, which was the weeder class for chem majors. The American Chemical Society sells bumper stickers that say "Honk if you passed P-Chem"; my professor handed them out after the final...to most of us.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Knowing the basic science behind professions should be a basic requirement of all university curricula. It is one of the things that separate trade schools from universities.
Some might say that it gives an additional burden because it might not be applicable directly to the actual job. But it serves two increasingly important purposes: it teaches you to think, and it gives you the ontological foundations for incorporating more knowledge.
I can only speak from my CS knowledge, but having studied Calculus and Algebra on my first year have truly opened up my mind and helped me become a better programmer, not just a computer scientist.
Calculus is essential because it's something that most people in related fields need to apply, and the CS curriculum should be designed so that one can interoperate with physicist, chemists, and engineers who have a need to apply their equations with computers.
Algebra completely changed the way I think about every logical construct, helped defined concepts that abstract away numbers, types, and classes, and presented me with some extremely difficult problems for which there was no other recourse than to brighten up and study and practice until one gets it. Forcing one to think and study beyond what one was used to in High School is a necessity.
In later years I was able to understand functional programming, abstract data types and numerical methods much more easily than if I hadn't; your mind clicks and relates all these concepts to each other and your learning accelerates exponentially.
So sure, if you're just a Java drone you don't need this. But Java drones are not true software engineers or computer scientists, and what's worse, they don't really know because they never managed to get into the depth of knowledge the subjects can get.
Take Type Theory and functional programming, for example. Very few people get to learn this in detail, and while you may never apply it fully professionally, the knowledge it brings helps you to define mental frameworks where proof of properties for objects, abstraction away from implementation, and modelling become significantly easier. Or numerical methods; chances are if you haven't taken a class on numerical methods - where you get pounded with rigorous proofs, arduous excercises, and loads of theory on computation, linear algebra, matrixes and such - you'll never really be capable of pulling off complex math problems without introducing slight calculation errors.
In the same vein, if you have the basics of organic chemistry, understanding how cetain medicines and biological processes work become significantly easier as you can get a feel of how that works on a fundamental level. I don't think that's exactly what keeps people from becoming doctors(something tells me it's got to do with being tens of thousands of dollars in debt by the time you graduate). I mean, if you suffer so much from just one course that it prevents you from continuing another 6 years of education, you never really had it in you to keep going, right?
In organic chem, you apply knowledge learned from the basic chemistry courses. In medicine, you also apply knowledge from basic chemistry courses. Look at it as a practice run for applying the more basic knowledge. Sheesh. Doctors are dumb enough already, thank you.
As a PhD in the research dpt of an academic hospital, I can tell you that such classes are really beneficial. Not in the least so that MDs finally understand what they are working with. Make no mistake: Doctors generally have no clue *why* for instance a lymphe node has swollen, or even what many antibiotics actually do. This complete lack of mechanistical insight in disease and cures by MDs has boggled my mind since I came here (and I have to teach them lab skills). Some background info on their actual work is no luxury.
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Premed majors aside, why did I, a pre-pharmacy student, have to take Organic I and II. I'm not planning on discovering new medicines and working in a pharmacy in Wal-Mart is less organic chemistry intensive than any medical doctor's job...
I hear the pre-med Biology classes are a bitch as well.
[Note: Learning the "Ankle Bone" song helps a lot.]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
My friend was in a car accident and needed emergency surgery to relieve pressure on his brain from a bleed.
The surgeon -- not a resident, but a surgeon at a major and reputable hospital near our nation's capital -- ducked in for what was supposed to be his usual once-a-day 15-second check-the-chart follow-up to surgery when I jokingly asked him whether he'd seen any prions in there as my friend is notoriously forgetful and ill-tempered.
[I was implying that my friend had Creutzfeldt-Jakob/Mad Cow disease. Bad joke. I know.]
The surgeon asked me what a prion was.
A BRAIN surgeon didn't know what a prion was.
FUCK!!
He was not joking. He had not mis-heard me.
I don't want to be smarter than my friend's brain surgeon. There's something seriously wrong with that.
I just finished medical school, following a degree in computer engineering. I found organic chemistry to be quite useless in both my medical training and practice.
Granted, I've gone into family medicine where the research and pharmacology is typically filtered through the specialties first, but I think the majority of org. chem was useless.
However, some details, like racemic mixtures, molecular configurations (i.e. citalopram vs. escitalopram) are useful. Biochemistry is also useful, as is pathology and pharmacology based on organic chemistry such as amyloid plaques, drug half-lives etc.
I think organic chemistry can be useful as integrated into medical school, however as a prerequisite I feel it is useless. As it is, there is a bias towards academia in med school admissions which I don't think serves our profession in the long run; most issues I see in our field relates to communication and relationships rather than medical mistakes due to a knowledge gap. We need to screen for personality as much as knowledge when looking at future doctors.
At my school, there was always more than one way to do things. ex: in lieu of basic physics one could take diff equs.
Because they tired the requirement, and made sure that classes at each tier were generally equally as hard as one another, and required different pre-reqs to take, one could be pretty much assured that someone taking advanced molecular genetics in place of Orgo 2 was getting an equivalently valuable education.
It should barely be an honours chemistry topic as it is. (I'm not bitter, I'm traumatised. I still wake up at night screaming about Woodward-Hoffman rules).
I'm a UK-qualified doctor.
Our system is different from the US in that medicine here is a first degree (well, tenchically two simultaneous first degrees) and not postgraduate entry usually.
The nearest equivalent of your premed is the subjects we take in our last school years.
I took the very usual combination of Physics, Chemistry and Biology. I liked Chemistry least by a long way.
Chemistry turned out to be the only one of the three that I ever really used at medical school.
(It may seem odd that it wasn't biology, but you relearn all the relevant stuff in much greater depth at medical school, whereas competence in chemistry is assumed at the start)
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
The American Medical Association, in order to raise the salaries of doctors, have purposely tried to cut down the number of admits to medical schools. By doing this they artificially lower the supply of doctors and raise their salaries.
And How do they artifically lower the supply? By making entry into the profession incredibly hard by making you take pointless classes such as organic chemistry and physics and with the MCATs.
The whole system is one big scam yet the average American seems to defend a system that they don't understand how it works.
For example, have you been to a doctors office? Its probably the nurse who sees you and asks you questions and the doctor doesn't even really do much. Are you telling me those 8 years in medical school all justify the patient being seen mostly by a nurse?
Imagine if there were an American Technological Association that dictated arbitrary standards for people to become computer programmers. So in order to become a computer programmer, you have to take physics, biochemistry, organic chemistry, and NOT computer program. And then you have to be at the top of your class and then apply to a COMPUTER SCHOOL. And then after 8 years in COMPUTER SCHOOL, that is when you have to study a bit more in order to pass your boards in order to start practicing programming computers. So by the time you're done you don't actually start programming in your late 20s at the earliest. Seems like a terrible system right? I'm sure all you tech geeks woould cry outrage since most of you started programming early in your teens or somewhere around there. Well thats what the AMA has done with medicine yet you people defend the system and that is why change will never happen.
that the organisms they are going to treat have a whole lot of organic chemistry going on inside them?
The second semester of O chem is mostly synthesis which is useless to physicians.
Why study organic chemistry when most people in the class will never so much as make one dime as a practitioner of the field? In the undergraduate science curriculum, organic chemistry occupies a special place that makes it a great case study in problem solving. Students come in generally with no background in the field, and they must learn to adopt a formalism for something they cannot see (even having completed a PhD in organic chemistry, I have never directly observed any of my reactions on a molecular level) and for which they do not come in having any intuition. They have to work with the vagaries of the real world, where things don't always fit neatly into simple mathematical formulas. Problems can be tactical or strategic in nature, involving qualitative or quantitative comparisons. Introductory organic chemistry is as much about learning problem solving (especially as relating to stuff you can't directly observe, as thus cannot develop an intuition through normal means) as it is about learning organic chemistry.
they don't need to know the principles that make the engine work.
It sure does, how is anybody going to understand anything about the body when we are made mostly of carbon atoms, and the only way to understand this kind of interactions is through organic chemistry, a doctor is not the one that gives drugs and pills, or that performs surgeries, a doctor is the one that knows best about the body a itÂs mechanisms!
Now, some anonimous flogger asks whether engineering students should be forced to suffer through calculus and physics. ... by the way, physics could go away too.
Dozens suffer hard hours studying instead of been drunk.
But we actually need engineers, so, lets make it easy and take calculus away
Ops, now I remember, if we do that instead of engineers they will be technicians.
How terrible would it be for doctors to have a thorough grounding in basic science?
I think everyone would agree that doctors should understand Biochemistry?
I would ask, how could anyone could diagram the mechanisms of the various biochemical pathways if they haven't taken Organic I&II?
everything in your body including drug interactions and the like are best understood through organic chemistry... frankly your doctor should have an idea of how chemistry works as biology and medicine is based upon it entirely.
the actual research an design. Medical school is just undergraduate level science followed by clinical practice.
In medical research, the MDs would look at clinical documentation to make their judgments as to whether in fact said compound is actually doing it's thing, causing side effects, etc....
They weren't the guys with the beakers and the CAD systems. Although valuable to the process (and paid much much more than the PhDs in Chem and Bio) they weren't the ones coming up the the breakthroughs that actually saved lives. Although, there were some REAL geeks who had both PhDs and MDs. They got out of school in their 30s and, well, really really loved medicine and science. They were also the very few who realized they shouldn't be dealing with people - unfortunately, quite rare in medicine.
An interesting note: from what I understand in some countries, to become a Dr., you have to start at the bottom - literally as an orderly. Then become a nurse after a few years and THEN a dr. No wonder their medical care is so much better than ours!
I heard an interview with a guy who evaluates foreign doctors. He said the problem was almost never with their knowledge of medicine. The doctors who were unacceptable almost always had problems with the way they practiced, not with their knowledge.
Demanding high academic standards doesn't stop inept bozos from entering practice. What it does produce is swollen headed egos who never listen to the patients and manage thereby to miss simple obvious symptoms.
Yeah this reminds me of the classic problem in lots of Comp. Sci. programs today, why bother to teach the nasty stuff like C++/Assembly/etc. when all anyone ever uses is Java, .NET and similar langauages anymore.
I've heard the argument both ways now, my thinking is what I've seen some universities do and offer 2 degrees, the Comp. Sci. sticks to the tougher stuff and the people graduate knowing how to build operating systems. Then you usually get a business computer programmming major of some sort that teaches the higher level languages. So you graduate people who can build business apps.
aIn either debate (the organic chemistry or Computer Science one) they all have their merits. I forsee in this debate 2 classes of doctors getting created, eventually you'll have the medical science students who took everything needed today, such as organic chemistry. Then the applied medical doctors who took what they needed in College (mostly useful stuff and not the organic chemistry component) then went straight to med school. Similar to the schism that's been going on in Comp Sci. for awhile now. The ramifications for both professions remains something I don't quite see however, I'd need to study more what it takes to be a doctor I think.
...in bed
While doctors may not need most of what is covered in O.Chem they do have a necessary requirement for Biochemistry (usually a 1 year series following O.Chem as a 1 year series) and that one Biochemistry class usually needs to support the needs of both Medicine and Biochemistry undergraduates. While the medicine folk could probably get away with an abbreviated O.Chem and a Biochemistry series that doesn't directly use that O.Chem knowledge, Biochemistry undergrads can NOT. So, if you remove that restriction for Medicine students then you need to separate the Medicine students from Biochemistry students and that will cost $$$. This type of problem where students with different majors need to share classes that could better be focused for their needs, if there was sufficient demand, is not unique to doctors sitting through O.Chem. Sharing of Electromagnetics between Physicists and Elec. Engineers and Discrete Mathematics between Mathemeticians and Computer Scientists (as well as Linear Algebra) are all similar examples.
Let's get rid of a need to know physics, so doctors won't need to bother with the difference between a dietary intake of 2000 calories and 20,000 calories - they're only arbitrary numbers, after all.
How about english? Do doctor's really need to know how to spell, or read properly. Let's face it, there's not a lot of difference between death and dearth, or patients and patience.
In fact why not open the doors wide and let anyone who can pay the fees become a doctor - issue them with white coats and stethoscopes on receipt of $100k and let them prescribe whatever they like to whom ever they choose.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You need O-Chem to understand Biochem. And oddly enough, I want my MD to actually understand what the hell is going on with my body chemistry.
That is all.
As a pre-med undergrad at UC Berkeley, I think it needs to be taught. I have been through a year of it (including labs) as part of my requirements, both for my major (molecular cell biology) and for med school. It was one of the hardest subjects I have ever taken. The kid next to me during the final for the second semester of it didn't write a single thing in three hours. I just heard him flip, flip flip.
It isn't about the course content. To be an effective doctor you don't need to remember how to synthesize carbonyls. Find me a clinical physician who can take me through the steps of glycolysis. Organic chemistry is a gauntlet. It's an incredibly difficult subject that doesn't smile kindly on rote memorization. Rather, a complete understanding and application of knowledge, often in seemingly-unfamiliar settings, is required to excel in the course. Yeah, some people made hundreds of flash cards, and some of them probably did well. But the longitudinal thinking that one has to go through to really shine in ochem is also needed in medicine.
Also, especially at Cal, classes like ochem are needed to pare down the pre-med pool. The merits of "weeding" kids out can be discussed, but there's no doubt that ochem is good at that.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
IAABP (I am a biology professor).
IMHO O-chem as it is taught by most chemistry departments is completely useless for pre-med students. There ought to be a lower level biochemistry course in its stead as a pre-req for pre-meds. Most MDs will NEVER have to worry about organic synthesis and crap like that; they WILL need to worry about metabolic pathways and enzymatic reactions.
NO CARRIER
IAAD (I Am A Doctor), and organic chemistry has less to do with the practice of medicine than general physics. (Really. Try understanding the limitations of an MRI machine without some physics background.)
I say get rid of organic chemistry and add in a requirement for something in the humanities, a year of a language, or something else that may actually come up when dealing with patients.
Or better yet, a year of economics, as physicians are notoriously bad at things dealing with money. I would suggest business management for a year, but is that even available as an undergraduate course?
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
That's why I became a Computer Programmer. Why bother calculating the answer yourself when you can have the computer do it for you? After all, there's code out there for almost any math you're likely to need.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
It seems that more and more, doctors (like engineers, administrators, etc) are becoming specialists, rather than generalists.
Unfortunately, this sometimes has the effect of giving the specialist tunnel vision. ie - they only see things from the perspective of their specialty. They tend to ignore the sometimes obvious things that a generalist would notice.
There are definitely reasons for becoming a specialist, but being a generalist, and having the broadest based education that you can has a lot to offer as well.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I agree that the brute force approach will get A grades in o-chem, but don't you think that maybe our doctors ought to learn how to think like scientists?
Hell, yes! They should think like scientists, but they don't. A majority of physicians in the US approve of teaching Intelligent Design alongside evolutionary theory, after all.
Further educational devolution (no pun intended) for doctors will not serve any good purpose. Ever looked at the prescribing information for a drug? How in the world is a doctor supposed to understand all that without a background that includes organic chemistry?
A good MD will try to be informed on developments in medical science, and you can't do that if you don't understand organic chemistry well. For instance, some substances that can stop ostheoporosis caused by some forms of cancer, can also induce osteonecrosis, especially in the presence of certain metals. An MD confronted with a patient with cancer-induced osteoporosis has a few options but must be alert and aware of the existing scientific papers on this specific field - and must be able to understand those papers! Of course, he/she can also just be a mediocrity that will cause his/her patient more harm than benefit.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
As someone currently applying for medical school I can tell you the whole thing is a shot in the dark.
An enormous number of people who will obviously go on to be awful doctors become doctors because they test well and do well in organic chemistry.
The opposite is also true. Plenty of great future doctors never get a shot at even going to med school. I have a good friend who has worked in medical research since high school. She has spent the last two years working directly with patients and physicians at the best oncology hospital in the world. She was a Russian language major but got a minor in chemistry. She got a masters degree while working (doing the medical research) after college. Every single medical school she applied to turned her down save one. That is despite the fact that every single physician she worked with would have placed her in medical school if they could.
People that ace orgo will often make good doctors because they can do the work. But folks that don't are not precluded from being doctors. The system is set up to minimize false positives without caring about false negatives.
Just remember the only part of the MCAT that at all correlates with success in medical school is the writing sample (which of course is rarely considered by medical school admissions committees).
C=MD
Yes, of course organic should be a pre-med requirement. So should biochem.
And what is "wry" about organic chemistry?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I'm a "premed" major, but don't worry, i'm not your typical MCB student. If you don't know what MCB stands for, I can assure you that you don't want to know anything about it.
Let me put it this way: medical school course requirements are basically a joke. 2 semesters of English, maybe 1-4 semesters of humanities for some schools, 2 semesters of basic biology, 2 semesters of basic chemistry, and 2 semesters of organic chemistry.
Out of those science courses, all the ones starting with "basic" are a joke. organic chemistry is the only real science course up there that's of real interest, and not memorizing random phylogenies (cough Bio 1A), random plants (cough Bio 1B), or 2 variable chemical equations (cough Chem 1A,...oh no....Henderson-Hasselbach!!!).
Taking out the ochem requirements would mean I was 100% qualified the day I started my freshmen year. There are enough students applying these days (med school acceptance rates are between 1 and 2.5%), lets not lower the bar even further.
If only because there are far more prospective med students then there are med school slots, and you need some sort of filter.
Also, US doctors are like the cool frat on campus; the hazing demands are ridiculous. None of them wants to see some young, less trained person enter their field that didn't have to go through the same crazy hazing experiences the US medical education system provides.
It does make for better doctors (although it makes them worse people), but it is not necessary for every doctor in every specialty to be so highly schooled on topics that are of date within years of leaving med school. It is proven that the system can deal with doctors who are not nearly as well schooled because every doctor who graduated 10 years ago or more already is one.
The only way the system will ever be reformed is if it comes outside the medical community. Which is a horrible idea and would ruin the medicine.
When/If the whole universal health care stuff gets shoved through, nobody's gonna bother being in school until their 30s, getting screamed at by surgeon because they didn't know every possible thing they haven't been taught yet, and not show up to family functions and funerals for the 4 years they're in med school, just so they can collect their government pittance.
as a (non md) researcher, i believe that there are, even in the pool of people who are MDs, very few who can do both clinical duty and research; this small group of exceptional people eat organic chemistry courses for breakfast, and then go on to one of the small number of spots in the MD-PhD programs ("Mud Fuds"), a program specifally designed to produce clinician researchers.
If you want clinical research, where you need both doctor (md) and doctor (phd) skills, it is probably best to have collaborations
Perhaps, in the near past (50 yeears ago) which is the time frame that formed the opinions of the now dead people who designed todays course work, there was a reaosn for an md to know organic chem, eg lab work (blood work, where they test your blood) was often done by the doctor - todays network of clinical labs didnt exist.
Today, there is very little need for most of hte basic science taugth to mds; even acid base and equivalent chemistry, used to figure out basic blood work, could probably be done more acurately by computer program then doctor
can be prevented by basic understanding.
Doctors get to proscribe drugs. This means that they should, at the very least, have a basic inkling of what drugs are and how they're made. That knowledge is not "useless" simply because the vast majority of doctors are never going anywhere near a chemical factory - if they have a basic inkling of what is going on, they are less likely to make obvious mistakes (proscibing the wrong drug, forgetting what the drug even is, etc. etc.)
Now, the fact that so many prescription drug errors *do* occur can be blamed, in significant part, on the fact that, in reality, many doctors manage to get through med school *without* a basic understanding of organic chemistry.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Specialists often get paid more and school is not getting any cheaper.
..
What is a generalist anyways?
I do geological engineering, in itself a pretty 'specialized' type of engineering compared to the rest (I know nothing of steel, concrete, electronics, etc)
Within my own fairly 'specialized' field there are are further specialties in: soils, earthquake engineering (ground), permafrost engineering, rock, slope stability, landslides, tunnel engineering [which further divides into underground mining vs. civil tunnels], subsurface contamination, earth embankment dams [also: tailing impoundments]
You, generally, can't do all of those and be any good at it. I've been doing this for 6 years and I have no experience in half of those, and a quarter of those my only experience was the classroom (e.g. negligible). Companies hire specialists for this reason, often at high cost.
And often in today's market, if you don't specialize then you're the first one on the chopping block when money is tight.
Seriously, how many doctors simply regurgitate the latest study to their patients without having any idea of the science behind it?
A doctor is not simply a caregiver. If someone cannot pass organic chemistry and they would make a good health care provider, there are many other options for them. PA, LPN, you name it.
I think doctors should have to take the full year of OChem that they do now, plus a full year of Biochemistry. And not the kind they teach in medical school, but heavy duty nuts and bolts biochemistry.
As an Engineering student who easily got an A in organic, I would suggest these so called brilliant doctors reevaluate their brilliance. Orgo was a joke compared to some of the chemical engineering classes that I have had.
I am so sick of hearing whiny pre-med students bitching about how they shouldn't need to take O Chem because it doesn't apply to them. O Chem is FUNDAMENTAL. I took O Chem and did well. Granted I'm a chemist so I enjoyed it. But I had to sit in a class with 50 - 75% premed students, of which 1 or 2 might get into med school. They all had this feeling that medical school was owed to them. I'm glad medical schools still weed out the idiots. Most of them would make great car salespeople. No offense to car salespeople. To me, premed students are worse than lawyers. I wish homeopathy worked.
Why bother to go through the 4 years of schooling to get a BS in something completely unrelated and THEN start learing about being a doctor?
Pre-meds should be taking every class possible that is closely realated to their chosen field.
Sadly most seem to be pre-occupied with taking easy classes and getting the highest grades possible so that they can get into a good school.
(And schools seem to be stupid enough to fall for this.)
Life is too short to proofread.
I can understand a debate about keeping hard math or physics classes out of premed, but isn't the human body like, made up of a bunch of carbon? and aren't medics taight to (among other things) cure their patients by introducing medicine that interacts with their chemistry into them? How can you be a medic and not know organic chemistry? Maybe nurses have to be premed too?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
I instructed organic chem labs as a grad student at a private midwestern university, working on my Ph.D. in the subject and think it is a beneficial and fundamental course for pre-meds to take. That said, most of them didn't put much effort into it and wanted to just get their A and move on. I think the bigger problem is a lack of passionate instructors to capture the students' interest and encourage them to get a well rounded understanding of basic science. Realistically, they will not be thinking about syntheses or molecular orbitals when they're in the O.R., but what university grad hasn't had to take courses directly relevant to their intended vocation?
what do you call the med student who graduates at the bottom of the class?
doctor......
This is like asking Software Engineers if they should have had to take Algorithms and Data-structures.
While some of them do see the fact that a close study of both of these is what has made google into the powerhouse it is today, some are just daft enough to go "Duh... no, I don't think they're strictly necessary." When the question is asked here on slashdot regarding "Do we still need computer science?" then I begin to question the intelligence of people who ask questions like that. The same is true for Doctor's who ask this kind of question.
The fact of the matter is that Medical Doctors are, at their core, scientists... at least they're supposed to be. Organic Chemistry is necessary for them to understand how the body functions at it's lowest levels. It's like when I had to take computer architecture... have I ever used it, no... am I thankful I did... YES, because I UNDERSTAND how the computer works at it's lowest possible level. It's that kind of intellectual maturity that they're after.
I certainly wouldn't like a doctor to work on me who didn't understand the possible interactions of some chemicals on cellular processes in my body. I would like him to understand on more than a rote memorization level why and how things work.
Later, GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
I am a physician, by way of mechanical engineering then biomed engineering. I did well in medical school; I now practice nuclear medicine, which depends on the understanding of biochemical pathways and physiology. I direct the use of state of the art medical imaging equipment, including radiology's glamour instrument, the PET/CT scanner. I administer antimatter -labeled radiopharmaceuticals to patients to diagnose and stage life threatening disease.
I never took organic chemistry.
During my coursework in biomedical engineering (the program was in the graduate sciences division of a medical school), I took most of my basic life science classwork with first and second year medical students. This included pharmacology, neuroanatomy, physiology, and biochemistry. These courses gave me my pre-requisites for medical school, and in fact, they supplied the background necessary for me to do well on the MCAT.
When I was accepted to medical school, I petitioned to "place out" of the organic chemistry requirement using the logic that I had taken and passed inorganic chemistry as a college freshman, and I had taken biochem with the medical students; that course was clearly not inorganic chem, so by definition, it must have been organic. They gave me a pass on that logic, but said I had to take their biochem (different medical school). Fine, I said.
To this day, if there was ever a clinical problem I couldn't solve because I never had organic chemistry, I never recognized it. Were there problems that I could solve that my classmates couldn't, because they didn't have thermodynamics or heat transfer or gas dynamics? Maybe, maybe not. But we learn what we need to learn, and we find a niche or we don't.
Do I think organic chem is necessary for a doctor? Well, obviously not. But one post above (from an MS-I) suggested it was an opportunity to "drink from a fire hose", and that might be the best reason to keep it in the curriculum. Just to be sure you can do it without drowning.
It would be insane to remove *all* organic chemistry from the pre-medical required set of courses. I could, however, see why one would question the second half of the year-long course. I'm pretty sure no MD or student will ever need to run into a chemistry lab and synthesize X organic compound (an MD/PhD, maybe, but they're a rare breed).
The value in that second course, however, lies in the understanding of how certain functional groups behave. A medical student WILL need this information to fully grasp how, for example, beta-lactam inhibitors like clavulanic acid can widen the spectrum of other antibiotics like amoxicillin. Or in the future, perhaps understand more specific theories on how free radicals can play a role in diseases like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's.
Perhaps a single, more intensive course could be designed. I can't imagine many chemistry departments jumping to the task, though.
Difficulty aside, would it hurt for a future MD to learn to appreciate the art of organic synthesis - if only just as a single element in what will be his or her vast scientific repertoire?
Organic Chemistry is a necessary rite of passage as the first post implies "By keeping idiots out of medical school." It is imperative that medical doctors think critically for solving a patient's problem and properly diagnosing the illness. One could argue inappropriately that Calculus is useless for physicians as well. For our society to produce high quality physicians, they must be 'challenged and tested' so to speak, in order to filter out the people who would not make good physicians, even though their intentions to help others are genuine.
As a pharmaceutical scientist who is challenged on a daily basis with my research, it really does take smart people to solve difficult problems. I am very comfortable 'talking shop' with my physician when I have to visit him/her for illnesses. In a sense, this establishes trust and peace of mind that this guy/gal went through 'basic training' and passed with honors and recognition for a job well done.
Move to a single-payer type system. As someone who is "forced" to pay for his own medicine, I can see the benefits of such a system. You immediately understand what the problems with medicine currently are. With widesperead dissatisfaction taking place, you *would* see massive overhaul of how medicine is taught and dispensed. You would see a move away from the current *guild* system and move to one that is science based and rated as such.
I know their are countless people who like the ignorance is bliss system and insurance hacks that want to keep things the way they are, but there will come a point that the system is universally recognized for the crap care it produces and at inflated and unreasonable prices. And that has nothing to do with knowing organic chemistry.
the nation goes hysterical over bisphenol a
kind of answers the question, doesn't it?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
most physicians I know are more interested in money, management, or making the best of a bad and now unchangeable career choice.
if physicians were more focused on health - the real, holistic health of the people who they care for (as opposed to the treatment-and-drug-oriented focus of western medicine) then they would WANT to know more organic chemistry, and, in a similar way work to change the broken healthcare mess (I won't even go so far as to call is a system)
Obviously the problem is lack of federal oversight of chemistry curricula. I'm going to write to Dubya and suggest he institute a "No Doctor Left Behind" program.
It would be foolish to allow people to write prescriptions (drugs are for the most part organic molecules) without the most basic of scientific understanding. We allow doctors to prescribe because they have been educated. An essential part of that education would be a basic understanding of organic chemistry.
I took Organic I AND II back in college and I wasn't even a pre-med student -- loved it. Organic is a *LOT* more than simple memorization / number-crunching. You have to learn how to problem-solve, and intimately understand how different functional groups behave. Surely Doctors can benefit from getting practice in predicting behaviors and problem solving, right?
De we really need to be memorizing hundreds of "may or may not work" heuristic rules and naming conventions that scientists sometimes, but don't often use? Maybe they should rethink the manner in which this course it taught. Memorization is not as important as it used to be in this field.
First time I've heard of organic chemistry referred to as a wry subject. Dry perhaps?
While I am sure that medical schools are the most appropriate group to decide what prereqs a student needs for their own schools, I don't think the real problem is the complexity (or usefulness) of organic chemistry that is limiting the field of potential MDs who have acceptable grades. Allow me to share a story from my undergraduate days that may illustrate a point.
My undergraduate work/study job was working in a research group of organic chemists and grad students focused on organic (a small group of about 6 or 7 altogether). One Tuesday night when we gathered for our weekly group meeting, our two professors, one tenured, the other in his first year teaching, were discussing the grading curve the new professor should adopt. This new professor was teaching the standard organic class, and the enrollment was about 300 students. The tenured professor advised that the new professor award 2 A's, 4 B's, and the rest as C or lower for a class of this size. I doubt you will find such a strignent curve in most other fields of study.
The reality is that organic chemistry is not a difficult subject, but the competition is fierce, specifically because these instructors know this determines who makes the cut for med school. If biochem is substituted (rather than "in addition" to), I suspect similar grading will evolve.
The actual subject material of organic chemistry has no direct relationship with medicine. Nobody has ever asked me to elucidate the molecular structure of protein X and synthesize it from scratch. When I started medical school with all those bloody didactic lectures, I felt as though I was at a severe disadvantage for scoffing at the biological sciences.
However, organic chemistry is as close to the 'hard' sciences (physics, math, computing, etc.) as some (most?) biology majors get. Organic chemistry mimics the learning process of medical school. During class, you're taught maybe 10 basic principles which allow you to predict and understand how molecules interact. In the lab (I mean a real synthetic organic lab where they build molecules, not the three-hour follow-the-recipe thing), one is given the opposite situation: given this molecule, how does one arrive at a set of starting materials? It is analogous to medicine. Patients don't (usually) come to the office and say, 'Doctor, I've got a pleural effusion.' They say, 'I'm short of breath' and then you have to figure out the disease. You have to be able to work backwards.
We have a saying, "Diseases don't read textbooks." Disease can present in odd ways. The old-school doctors -- the guys who actually have read their pathology and understand their disease processes -- can figure it out. Others can't. Most of the premed kids don't give a rat's ass about mechanisms. They don't care about understanding. They're focused on getting good grades and pretending to be altruistic. They don't like organic chemistry because it is 'hard' and 'difficult to get good grades'. They don't like organic chemistry because it's simply different, and consequently mentally challenging, frustrating and sometimes incomprehensible. (And smelly.)
Guess what? Organic chemistry is a pretty good preview of what medicine is like on the wards.
And as for suggestions of 'more biochemistry', I'd have to say that I haven't noticed a lot of biochemistry involved in medicine either. Most of us have forgotten, or could only give you the most basic outlines of the active site for any drug -- and that's only if the mechanism of action for a drug is known. The last time I needed to know about the Krebs cycle was...for the MCAT, I think. I'm not even sure it showed up then. I did learn about cholesterol synthesis in an organic chemistry class...now that IS relevant to today's doctor.
With respect to research -- most people are not born researchers. Most people who work at a university-affiliated 'academic' center do research because it's a condition of their employment. Truly gifted researchers are few and far between. Organic chemistry isn't human alchemy -- it can't turn a dimwit into a genius. I suppose it could help some people learn to formulate proper hypotheses and experiments.
A proper premed curriculum, IMHO, contains a good mixture of: physical sciences (calculus, algebra, STATISTICS, physics (some basic electronics and quantum mechanics)), programming (information storage, manipulation, retrieval and general problem solving skills), chemistry (organic, analytical, and physical), anatomy and physiology, English and preferably a second language (because you need to communicate with your patients and/or lawyers), basic psychology (see point above), and perhaps some biomedical ethics/philosophy/history
After learning how to think and solve problems, learning enough molecular biology, biochemistry, microbiology, etc. to be a good doctor is a relatively minor matter.
I'm a molecular biology major, and many of my classmates were pre-med. Doctors should have to take biochemistry, of which organic chemistry is usually a pre-requisite. While many doctors do not do research, they still need to understand how basic chemistry in the body takes place. It's unfortunate that organic chemistry is required for biochemistry though, because much of organic chemistry is memorizing pointless non-biological reactions. The important aspects for bio molecules certainly can be taught in a 2 semester biochemistry class though.
Calc I and II counts as higher math now?
Politicians and DEA bureaucrats PROscribe certain drugs...
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I think that o-chem was one of the most useful classes I took as an undergrad. You learn stuff that can be useful for nutrition, removing stains with the appropriate solvents, making bombs and drugs, and if you personify the different molecules, you can learn a lot about interpersonal relations. My prof said that potassium tert-butoxide was like a person with a fat ass trying to date. The have a hard time squeezing into tight locations, so they can't react with hard-to-get bonds. But if they find a bond that they can react with, then they'll react right away without thinking twice.
I used to think that o-chem was the hardest class that I'd have to take, but then for some reason I switched to CS...
I was a pre-med, then thought better of it (now, 24 years later I'm an IT director).
I despised Orgo, but did well in it. Perhaps it was more useful to me as a programmer/analyst for a pharmaceutical company than an average MD, but look at it this way:
Less of medicine is surgery than pharmacology. To understand pharmacology and pharmacodynamics, you need biochemistry, and organic chemistry as a base for that. Even the surgeons should understand what the anticoagulants, anaesthetics, anticonvulsants, etc. etc. (without leaving the a's) are doing to their patients while they're on the table.
When I started as a pre-med, there was a lot of talk of "holistic" medicine, and a good friend of the family was an osteopath... and it's bullhookey. Your body is a chemical engine, regulated by hundreds of mediating factors. Drugs affect the performance of these factors, or replace ones your body doesn't produce, or affects the chemical factories you don't like (cancer, fungi, viruses, fat cells) hopefully more than the ones you do (brain cells, muscle, intestinal lining, retinal cells -- no respective order implied).
There should be more emphasis on experimental *method* than crappy little experiments to isolate a solid from a liquid, but the science is the basis of everything that's happening to your patient that doesn't just involve physics (cutting them open, broken bones).
Design for Use, not Construction!
It all comes down to whether you believe a doctor should be a professional, based in authority and precedents, like a lawyer, or a scientist, based in inquiry, skepticism, and exploration.
I'd prefer my general practitioner to be a scientist, but my specialists to be professionals.
Many doctors I know behave as professionals. They aren't interested in exploration. For such doctors, there is no need for organic chemistry. For specialists, there's so much accepted information to absorb that open inquiry is often out of the question. This changes for frontier fields like neurology, however.
It's certainly easier to train someone in precedent and authority, however, and no easier to pass such courses as a student. Leaving out organic chem would be a convenience to the professional trainers, not to the student.
It's really a question of style, more than substance. Both approaches are substantial.
--
Toro
That's what I like about my Materials class (ME), it's applied chemistry and a lot more fulfilling than all the chemistry I had up until now (high school chem I, high school chem II and then university chem I -- five semesters of the exact same material).
I'm sick and tired of people actually believing that some of these classes are actually required. How about adjusting the classes so that your class work, classes, and education in general is more specialized for the career and/or degree your working towards.
Before anyone says replies that I don't know what I'm talking about you should know that I have 6 separate/different degrees and I have taken organic chemistry and there associated labs.
The information being taught should be more specialized and not designed based on the the number of credit hours that the class has associated with it. It's ridiculous to think that everyone (Biology, Pre-Med, Nursing, Physics, etc) would need to know every last one of the basic principles of the various fields of science that exist. How about actually sticking to what needs to be known now and in the future, that does not necessarily include org. chemistry.
Maybe it is more important to know how the body works and actual real world tests then knowing every last drug interaction. Not one doctor except for ones that do research would have the time to examine/research in depth the chemical interactions with every last drug that is prescribed. There is a reason some people do research and that there are testing standards (Pharm. companies/Pharm. degrees). We need a rethinking of how we teach students and what is actually needing not just thinking about money and busy classwork. Some people need to get a clue.
When my midwife started telling me about why I shouldn't eat too much tuna, I stopped her and asked if she wanted to know more details about what mercury does to protein structure. SHE actually learned something new that day. Medical people should definitely have at least some vestigial knowledge of O-chem et al. They don't have to remember it ALL, but they should have enough of an idea to be able to look things up, have conversations with other experts, and have some grasp of what they're discovering.
The o-chem I took (and I'm a mathematician, so how I ended up with it is a long story) was mostly "name that molecule" and "memorize these reactions."
You're absolutely right about it being abstracted into meaninglessness. I only wish I had a good idea of the fundamentals of how electrons behave, then I wouldn't have memorized (and later forgotten) almost everything I knew about the subject.
I don't think it's nearly as hard as some people make it sound, but that may depend a lot on your ability to memorize information. I can store a LOT of information, but it tends to evaporate all too quickly. So I was able to pass all those tests, but the knowledge didn't last very long at all. Fortunately, I'm no doctor.
On the other hand, I had a great physics course that was a lot more like what you describe. We didn't do fancy equations, we did lots of modeling and we had to prove simple things, like what a frictionless block on a frictionless incline on a frictionless surface would do (slide off... and roll over). I learned more from that than most courses. I wish there were more courses like that. But the whole reason it was like that was because we had a TA who was getting a masters in education who helped the professor shape the course.
You don't find that very often.
Regardless, I really didn't put in a substantial amount of effort and I achieved Bs. Many premed students struggled very hard and I never really understood why. The only memorization necessary was the reagents, but many of the reagents were taught with their mechanisms. By seeing the flow of electrons, things made sense. After awhile, you just started seeing patterns. My strategy was simply rewriting my notes from class a few times.
Premeds frustrate me. Many of them achieve excellent grades but don't appear to retain the information they've learned. I've also noticed a cheating culture among them. The problem isn't with forcing organic chemistry on the poor premeds, the problem is that tests aren't great indications of knowledge. Classes exist mainly to weed out the more dimwitted types. Other methods of weeding out are: letters of recommendation, standardized tests, and lab experience, with the letters and lab experience being the most important and realistic measures of intelligence and competence.
I'm currently at PhD student in biological engineering, but as an undergraduate I majored in chemistry and specialized in organic, taking the full sequence of open-registration graduate courses that my school offered.
As a tutor and TA for three years, I can echo the (only partially sarcastic) sentiments of many posters that I encountered a number of nice, well-intentioned people who had absolutely no business being physicians, and were shown that early by organic.
On a more serious note, I believe organic is vital for premed students, as well as for a variety of other basic science students (including many who don't currently have to take it).
The important issue that I don't think many people recognize is that some subjects have value outside their actual factual content, and I think organic is a prime example. I'll be the first to admit that a physician will likely never have to show the electron pushing mechanism for a Claisen condensation or analyze a Hammet plot. Organic's value comes in its structure. Many detractors dismiss organic as a useless collection of rote-memorized facts. The truth is, the students who attempt to tackle organic by pure memorization very rarely succeed to any measurable degree. The only way to master organic is to realize that its hundreds of reactions are all variations on a set of only a dozen or so schemes. Organic is often the first (and sometimes the only) class that teaches students practical pattern recognition and useful data consolidation/categorization.
What if I am headed to be an RN and want to take Ochem?
Thats because a CS degree is supposed to teach the science aspect .. such as kernel design .. optmization .. stuff working close to the hardware.
I believe programming in Java, .NET, databases etc. are nowadays being included as a degree called something else .. maybe Information System Engineering ? Or something like that .. I'll have to check.
If you are not smart enough to ace O-chem, you have no business applying to Med school. Pharmacology is a major aspect of modern medicine. A doc needs to know how medicines work, and O-chem is essential to understanding biochemistry. What a stupid question to even raise...
Do you want doctors that can figure out what the drugs they sell actually are and can do? Then OC is just the start.
Do you want doctors that are simply body technicians and sell whatever sticks in their mind due to Big Pharma advertising? Then drop OC.
Why is this in WSJ? Are they capable of evaluating the data? Do they know enough about medical training? Are they aware that by interviewing practicing doctors they're asking those who have found that the way medicine is presently practiced they have no need of OC? Why don't they ask people who have been over-medicated and under-treated by such "professionals"? Does WSJ report that 50%+ of all funding for US medical schools comes directly or indirectly from Big Pharma?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
... if they have plenty of money. It takes money to cheat effectively in such a field.
Of course, this is also a problem with government.
I do believe a doctor should be able to understand WHY that compound they are prescribing has an "HCl" at the end of it. (Not that HCl is organic... but the interactions are.)
When medical schools have trouble recruiting students, then you can start talking about barriers that exist which keep people from applying.
There are not too few people applying to medical school. The admissions percentages have basically stayed the same for at least 10 years. If medical schools want to admit more people now, they can. There's no need to broaden the application pool. This is just the Journal taking potshots at science and medical doctors who are still upset over being taken down a peg in a hard class.
I've been a university bio prof for decades, and most of my students have been pre-meds. I've also been involved in biomedical research and known dozens of MDs during that time. Not once . . . not one single solitary time . . . did I ever see anyone, at any level, use knowledge they got only in basic O-Chem.
The chemistry that doctors actually need is learned in basic bio and biochemistry. They could do without O-Chem entirely and nobody would ever notice any difference, except that we might get better doctors because they'd have more time to study the things they need to know.
Speaking as a TA for an intro physics course, the number of plain scientifically stupid people in "Pre-med" scares the hell out of me. Any doctor I go to I ask what their score on their intro physics course was - I'd rather see their transcripts than some medical degree on the wall! As for ORGANIC CHEMISTRY = how can that NOT be a requirement for wanting to be a doctor? You should at the very least have an understanding of the basics of the theory behind your job when you do something like this!
Well, let's see. I can A) become a generalist (general practitioner), or I can B) become a specialized radiologist and work more regular hour and be paid twice as much. Seems like a no-brainer actually...
-JS
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
I think it is a great class for pre meds. As it is usually taught it is a class to see how much you can quickly memorize and regurgitate. The first 2 years of med school are the same.
Seems like there are a lot of "As a this or that kind of student" posts so I'll address it from the non-student side. I taught both lecture and labs for O-chem and it is a very good intro for students to what an "intense" course is like. Lots of info in a short period of time. It was my job to make it relevant to the class as a whole so I covered advanced general chem (orbitals, bonding) followed by an intro to what organic is (classes of molecules) followed by several chapters on the chemistry of basic functional groups (learn the mechanism!). The next semester should include more functional group chemistry and a solid into to biochem. All of this is relevant as our bodies (the ones the doctors are treating) are basically doing complex reactions on complex organic molecules with all kinds of functional groups. They are prescribing complex organic molecules for us to take to improve our lives. I'd like my doctor to know the difference between a carboxylic acid and an amine, or a steroid and a opiate. Also - he should have some basic understanding of how any why these molecules interact with our bodies (please please please remember hydrogen bonding). I really don't want him to think of me as a black box and try things in a Edisonian manner.
Also - its a great weedout class :P I got to see my students take exams (I was a nice guy - but some people STILL couldn't get half the questions right) and work in the lab. I had a low dropout rate, but the ones that did ALL told me they were premed and needed more time to get ready for hard classes. I doubt any will be back. I had several pass the course BARELY and decide medicine or vet school probably wasn't in the cards. What it boiled down to was effort. I had some OK students that did really well in the course simply because they put in the effort. They came to office hours (I begged!), they came and found me at lunch, they came to lab sections, they emailed me questions - they were not straight A students but they wanted a good grade in chemistry for the graduate applications. I didn't give them good grades because they were around so much - they got the grades because they asked a lot of questions about topics they were unsure of. Its a complicated science to learn and as hard to teach - some of the stuff is easier to grasp when a teacher is telling and showing you examples rather than reading it from a dry text book. There were a lot of kids in there that will make good doctors - doctors I'd go to, but the ones that didn't make the grade were not putting up the effort. Not the kind of doc you want to have.
One more thing - biochem may be more relevant, but you need more than general chem to understand it. Organic chemistry is the basis of biochem. If you don't know what a carboxylic acid, amine, alcohol, etc. are, you won't understand the fundamentals of biochem. So even if you drop organic - its going to be covered in biochem. You cannot escape.
I thought it was a good idea
In the real world it is the pharma rep who educates the medical professional, and so it would make a lot of sense
for the pharma industry to compile and deliver the curriculum.
To every person who said "I don't need subject XYZ to work in field ABC", I say, you are a fraking idiot. For many of the classes people take, it's NOT the content, it's the process of learning. Just as athletes do all kinds of exercises and training to prepare to compete in sport X, 'brain workers' need to exercise and develop their brain to prepare to be an expert at Z. Be it Organic Chemistry, Calculus, English Literature, Latin, History of Japan, etc, etc, it's the mental exercise of mastering the material, NOT the material itself that is essential. I don't want a Doctor or Lawyer or EE or whatever who hasn't sufficiently built up mental muscle power to cure me, represent me, or design the equipment that saves my life.
...all you really need to tech them anyway is how to recognize what a good leaving group looks like.
I'm not sure why this is even a topic brought up. One of the first topics covered in med school is biochemistry which has a firm grounding in organic chemistry. You cannot walk before you crawl... In the big scheme of things organic chemistry is not the most difficult of courses. It does however require a style of learning which incorporates general chemistry concepts with new concepts. It is true that most doctors do not do research. However, it is necessary for them to know concepts such as how a drug interacts with its target on a protein, how the liver can modify toxins into carcinogens, or how very energetically different cis versus trans fats (all topics introduced in organic chemistry). In my opinion, people who cannot handle this topic and or see how it applies to medicine have no business being doctors. I'll admit that not all of the practice of medicine can be described by chemistry, but it is absolutely essential to understanding the molecular interactions within the human body. Yes organic chemistry is a weed out course, but I believe that the overall quality and intellect of the physicians would decrease if organic was removed as a requirement.
So you think osteopaths are BS? Perhaps they are.. then again, perhaps they arent.
You're right. The body is a chemical engine. NO2 works on the penis via Viagra. It also, in some cases, affects Red-Green color vision ALSO via the NO2 receptors. It also can affect the heart via NO2 receptors. That's how nitroglycerin works too, and why Alfred Nobel was prescribed it.
We see this in nearly every drug, where the supposed cure ends up inflicting a different symptom. Of course the percentage is small, but cross-receptors and inhibitors allow it to happen.
Now, you're going to tell me that each organ in the body is its own black box that We can treat directly? Utter rubbish. They do a part, and are part of the whole. And what makes me thikn towards osteopathy is that we are now learning how to tailor drugs for individuals. That right there says we need to look at what we affect across the whole system, and not just one part.
I find that most of the mechanisms were useless, other than the E-series and SN series... but the general themes are important in med school biochemistry and pharmacology. It makes the reactions make so much more sense, so you can rationalize them out.
So basically... the first one and a half months of Organic Chemistry I. Organic chemistry lab is sorta useful too, but I also did the useful parts in Biochemistry lab, so whatever.
... for a change. That is what medical students are forced to know in Germany as they start their studies. If they hadn't had it in school, they must learn it in the first semesters.
Now, that is a useless rite of passage; all they later use it for is to learn all Latin words they need (body parts, herbs, etc.) by heart.
Every aspiring doctor should be taking organic chemistry. The knowledge learned may not be applicable in everyday practice, but the insights gained into applied pharmacology can be occasionally invaluable.
Several months ago, I was explaining why prescribing over-the-counter, generic Prilosec (omeprazole) was just as good as writing a script for "top-of-the-line" Nexium (esomeprazole). You could arrive at this knowledge one of two ways: A) read and understand the clinical research behind both drugs, especially between the lines, and that both of them are effective at treatment or B) understand that Prilosec is simply the racemic mixture, while Nexium is the filtered enantiomer.
If you were a decent critical thinker, you might even question why no one's funded a head-to-head clinical trial of Prilosec vs. Nexium. But then people might go back to using a cheap generic vs. spending billions more on the patented blockbuster. Or, maybe, it could mean the difference between a minimum-wage mom filling her prescriptions ($4 a month generics is perhaps one good thing that Wal-Mart has given to the world) or being unable to afford them.
And this just scratches the surface. Why is physostigmine an effective antidote for certain toxicities while pyridostigmine is not? Why is thiomersal exposure unlike methylmercury exposure? What's the difference between eating omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6 fatty acids? Etc.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I'm a family physician, graduated med school in 2001, been in practice since 2004. First, I loved O-Chem, so I'm probably odd. General chem was okay, but it was a much bigger weed-out class. It felt like more rote memorization.
O-chem was interesting and fun, because the reactions made intuitive sense. Once you understood why the electrons flowed the way they did, you didn't have to memorize the Clemenson reaction or the Grignard reaction, you just "got" why they worked.
If you don't understand O-chem, you really will never get biochemistry. Although med students complain about first-year biochem, it's essential. When I decide to prescribe Crestor to someone for their hyperlipidemia, I really ought to know how Crestor works. Specifically, what does Hmg-CoA reductase do, where does it work in the cholesterol synthesis cycle, and why would it be good to take Crestor. Instead, you have doctors or PA/NPs who simply prescribe Crestor because the last drug rep was cute, rather than understanding the underlying pathophysiology.
To the posters who've noted that demand is outstripping supplies of doctors: I agree that we need to lower the barriers to producing more doctors. But, dumbing down pre-med isn't the answer. Moderating the cost of medical education could go a long way. There's a tremendous shortage of Family Physicians and general Internists. But if you're a 4th year med student looking at $250K of student loan debt, you've got to consider your ability to repay it. From an purely economic standpoint, why would I do a 3 year primary care residency and make $170K/year, when I could do a 4 year anesthesia residency and make $400K/year.
Since I am a Family Doc, there must be more reasons than just economics (or perhaps I couldn't get into an anesthesia residency ;-). I dunno. I always planned on Family Medicine.
Back to the original question. Next time you get a drug sample, unfold the little packet of paper that folds out to the size of a large map. That's the product insert. Look at the very top. There's a picture of the chemical structure, and the actual name of the molecule.
Damn right O-chem is needed!!
I have to say, it drives me crazy when I understand the chemistry of a drug my doctor is prescribing ... but he doesn't. This happens pretty frequently, actually. And I am not a chemistry major or chemist; just a bioengineering/cs guy who happened to take o-chem on the way up.
Even so, first-term o-chem was really quite easy, even at a #1 school: much easier than, say E&M or differential equations, which I took the same year, and dramatically easier than biochemistry, which requires an understanding of o-chem and is certainly important for medicine. If the people who are going on to become our nation's doctors find first-year o-chem to be a struggle, then they really shouldn't be doctors.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
If they seriously can't handle a second semester of an introductory course, they shouldn't go to med school. It's regardless of whether they actually need it or not; they'll jump through plenty of hoops and do plenty of things they don't want to do to get where they want to go.
I mean, this isn't like "Should a pre-law student have to learn trig?". O-chem, while one of the most painful subjects ever (I never took the course, but I read the book cover to cover because it was there) is actually incredibly important for doctors to be able to simply understand what is written in medical journals.
What makes a physician educated in the university different that fruitcakes like faith healers is that they are expected to learn about the human body from not only experience and experimentation, but from learning from the advanced research of others.
I read medical journals so that I can pretend like I'm smart. I enjoy reading about how treatments we've used for the past 10,000 years are in fact dangerous and should be avoided. Most importantly, as a smoker, I take Chemo-therapy VERY seriously and hope there will be a replacement treatment for it at some point so I may suffer through emphasima treatment as opposed to cancer treatment. I would not be able to understand these journal entries if it were not for O-chem. More importantly, when the time comes where I will need to address this issue for my personal health, I will need to talk with my physician to discuss the applicability of the new treatments for my case and therefore I demand that he/she is able to read the articles as well.
A doctor is expected to be an educated person. A doctor should be a person that we can trust. But when a doctor says that we should allow them to be called doctors when they can't even understand an article in a medical journal regarding the blood chemistry of jaundice, they should have their licenses revoked!
Yes, O-chem is not Bio-chem, but you can't expect to actually understand Bio-chem without the foundations of O-chem. It would be like studying Calculus and Differential Equations without first having learned Algebra.
I'd like to call for a committee to be established to address this issue. I believe that all the doctors that have been cited as ignoring the importance of O-chem should have their medical license reviewed. I believe the first step will be to visit the doctors, measure the thickness of the layer of dust on top of their medical books and observe their desks, I guarantee that each of them have many more magazines about golfing, boats and overpriced cars than medically related items.
You can. In South America, you can directly get into an MD program from high school. And if you jumped a couple of grades, a Medical School will accept you as young as 16 years old. If you just take these two steps, then come back to the US to get re-certified, the US re-certification should take you two years, so if all goes well -- that's a net gain of four years you'll have -- over the other US-trained doctors.
Why ever would you think doctors need organic chemistry? Dr. Lexus to the rescue!
As a medical school dropout, I found organic chemistry useless.
As a hardly hardcore engieer, I found calculus and assembly language unnecessary.
As a self-made investor who can do better than the typical mutual fund manager, I regularly apply what I learned in my introductory economics classes, not that often to my investing, but to my interest in business and world events.
So... it's a little less than "are these classes necessary" than "do these classes have meaning to a successful professional". Which, I suppose, is a fancy way of saying "weed out". (:
Forget organic chemistry. How about making psychology a mandatory part of being a doctor?
Someone supply me the name of the logical fallacy that involves artificially reducing the problem to exclude a solution.
You almost got away with the Heart Surgery example, but I can't think of *anything* that needs more knowledge of Orgo Chemistry than prescribing!
Let's think of a really easy example. Aspartame. Through some aggressive marketing, the substance was the premier diet drink sweetener until the last few years. However, it is unstable under easily reachable conditions (like a hot warehouse), and often breaks down into really nasty components. So we all agree to pick an alternative. I'd like a doctor to know if Sucralose or Sorbitol will interact with diabetes medications.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
i attended a pharmacy school recruiting lecture at my university, and the pharmacy professors said that Pharmacists from the 70s, on average, simply don't know as much about the extra, in-depth course-work on enzymatic reactions, cell structure, structural biology, all which have been facilitated by advances in NMR, PCR, Mass Spec, IR, which have brought more molecules to be covered for applicable drug research, and thus is important both for pharmacists and doctors who prescribe compounds and know more about how drug specificity works in biochemistry. Any elective, including biomedical ethics, and medical anthropology all help, because it's something you encounter everyday. it's all significant and interesting.
I for one certainly want my doctors to be able to chemistrate without resorting to using fertilisers or pesticides!!
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
These days most MD's are nothing but diagnosticians and pill pushers. The term Medical Doctor has lost its meaning. Why not just create a new category between pharmacist and the real MD's and call it "Health Specialist" or somesuch, and put all the supposed MD's there until they prove that they DO understand those "hard" subjects like chemistry and philosophy.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
When I was a freshman comp sci major in 94-95, a lot of people were starting down the comp sci track because programming was a path to a relatively well paying career.
We had our academic hazing class the second semester of our freshman year. Good thing too. Everyone whose heart or aptitude wasn't into programming got another major.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to entrust my medical care to a doctor who doesn't know basic organic chemistry.
I suppose it might depend a little on the specialty. Doctors who don't do anything but surgery, for instance, could probably get by without it. But for general practice, and especially for diagnosis of systemic conditions... how on earth would you understand what's going on in the human body -- especially when something is going wrong -- without a solid grounding in how the body is supposed to actually work?
Suck it up and take the class. You might learn something.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Which is where the problem lies...
A) care more about yourself than patients
Historically, doctors have put patients first. It seems that mindset is going by the wayside with the "it's all about me" society of today, which I think is unfortunate.
My father-in-law has been fighting cancer for the past 2 years, and we're about to term with our next child. He told the doctor that he was fighting to be around to see it.
Instead of the doctor telling him "We'll do our best to help you meet that goal.", all he got in response was "I don't think you're going to make it. oh our time's up - I've got a tee-off time to meet.".
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
That's okay, a lot of medical school is massive brute force memorization too. (Anatomy comes to mind in particular, but it's hardly the only one.)
No. It's only that massive amount of idiot are hanging around med schools and prefer brute force methods instead of trying to put their brains to more efficient use. ... is a sign that lots of students are stupid ... is a sign that the teaching system is broken and doesn't present the data the way they should.
To take your example of Anatomy, most of the naming is just describing in latin/greek from where to where a structure is connected (the muscle attached to the sternum, the mastoid process and the clavicle is simply called sternocleidomastoid muscle). Most of the nerve connexion start to make sense once you start looking a little bit at embryology. Nature *does* make sense. A weird sense (as nature isn't intelligently designed as much as having evolved through emergent systems). But nonetheless makes sense.
The fact that countless student are too brain dead to notice it and prefer stupidly learning everything by heart...
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but doesn't mean that medical school is necessarily brute force memorization. For the record, I never brute force memorized anything in my medical studies and still managed to get my medical degree.
If anything, some basis in organic chemistry, physics and other hard science (and even more : statistics), are *vitally necessary* to help the doctor acquire a good scientific critical sense.
Otherwise, they would quickly buy into any snake oil marketed by efficient charlatans even if it blatantly violated several laws of physics or chemistry that they should have understood (but only brute force memorized them instead).
Disclamer: I have a medical degree, and had worked as anatomy teaching assistant, among others. Had also plenty of time to develop computing skills thank to not loosing my time by brute-memorizing stuff stupidly.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I can understand taking basic Chem 101 or Physics 101 or History 101 to gain an understanding of these subjects
Well apparently, in your case, it's a problem of dosage. Maybe your faculty insisted too much on an unnecessarily advanced level.
But as you point out, it is still important to have some basic knowledge in lots of scientific field. Even if it isn't you final field of expertise, that still help one to obtained a good general scientific culture.
which also help in producing scientist which are a little bit critical and sceptic and won't necessarily buy into whatever snake oil some efficient charlatan is try to market them. To make exaggerated caricatural examples : it makes those scientists better able to discern why intelligent design proponents' "theories" doesn't work, why cults such as Scientology are utter crackpot bullshit, etc.
This is very much important in the medical field, where once you graduate, you are constantly exposed to pharma corporations' marketers trying to push hard *their* products and bellow average publications in papers holding some strange theories, all based on shoddy statistics, unproven principles, and so on.
You don't need basic biochem, orgchem and stats to do medecine. But you need them to avoid risking life of patients, just because during the presentation the merketing-girls' dress was sexy and because the cocktails were free at the convention.
Also, having some broader scientific knowledge increases the probability "Eureka" moments, when you spot something unusual that is worth further analysing and may lead to new scientific idea that help progress research. Keep in mind that not all medical progress starts with some complex experiment in a fundamentalist's essay tube. Some time, progress is sparked by someone in the field who notice something unusual and whose scientific curiosity is stimulated by this (instead of just dismissing it), because (s)he known that this *shouldn't* normally happen. Or because (s)he suddenly realises that some obscure old unrelated knowledge learned during studies might end up being applied to this situation.
You didn't encounter any protein or amino acid in your electrical engineer carrier. But maybe some of your colleague realised that some of the thing he worked on could be applied on some other fields, and maybe that colleague helped develop some of the tools that are used currently for analysis in Proteomics.
Then of course, it all boils down to defining how much is defined as "basic", and how to present the subject in a clever way that compels the student to learn and understand the principles rather than brute force memorize everything.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I'd like a doctor to know if Sucralose or Sorbitol will interact with diabetes medications.
Which can be looked up online or in a medical reference, no? Why would an understanding of actual chemistry mechanics help with that?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Did you take a full year of organic chemistry (two classes) or a single-semester "engineering organic chemistry" class that I know most engineering departments have?
The single-semester o-chem class I took as part of my chemical engineering degree was easy, but because it was taught by an engineering professer who approached it in a way similar way all our other classes.
Many people make a big deal about how hard organic chemistry is and I for one think that is over blown. If my doctor can't understand something fairly basic (it is usually a sophomore level course) in ANY discipline I can't see wanting them to take a knife or prescribe meds to me. Simple as that.
But I don't think that it should be a pre-med requirement. I was a physics major, loved math, and found chemistry exciting. However, I look at what a doctor does on a daily basis and realize that I rarely if ever use the skills I learned in organic chemistry. And this isn't just about what a doctor should learn in school - organic chemistry is a major component of the MCAT medical school entry examination.
I've read a lot of the arguments (here and elsewhere) for organic chemistry.
"Doctors need to know the basic science behind what they do" - as a physicist, I realize that undergraduate organic chemistry does not accurately represent the basis for chemical reactions. It certainly gives you a language for lab and industrial synthesis. But until you take at least physical chemistry, the rest is hand-waving. I think that chemistry should be taught to pre-meds, but feel that biochemistry is best matched to actually understanding the way that drugs work, for instance.
"We need a weed out course for all the idiots" - fair enough. But there are many potential weed out courses with equally compelling claims to relevance. Take differential equations, for instance. It's one of the first places in math that you learn how to ask a scientific equation and actually have the skills to construct an appropriate model. And I guarantee you that it would weed out a lot of people. Or physical chemistry - if you really want people to know the basis of chemistry (as chemists see it), you should use the traditional chemistry major weed-out course. Or take an advanced statistics course - much more applicable to the actual accumulation of new knowledge as a doctor. The ability to critically read journal articles is probably the most important scientific skill for most practicing clinicians.
"Doctors need to be more scientific and understand how basic science works" - couldn't agree more. But organic chemistry does not accomplish this. The best way to learn how basic science works is to do basic science. Research in a basic science lab would be an excellent pre-med requirement. Not a class focused on using pre-derived reactions to create a final product. That's just a mathematical proof in another name.
"Organic chemistry is mentally challenging and builds mental rigor" - this is not really true as it's normally taught in the first two semesters. It's mostly an exercise in memorizing individual pieces of a language and then being able to use that language to create a previously unknown sentence. To that end, logic classes are more helpful to form a generalized framework for approaching new problems. And plenty of classes challenge the mind - pick pretty much any math class, any upper level physics class. Heck, being able to critically read a work of literature or critically view a work of art challenges the mind. That's what college is for.
Anyway, pre-medical education is an interesting topic which is currently being debated in medicine. The most recent comprehensive treatment of the subject was in the New England Journal July 17th by Jules Dienstag, head of medical education at Harvard. From personal experience under him, I can say that he is well qualified to help plan for a future where physician-scientists will have to incorporate ever more vast expanses of knowledge in order to treat patients effectively.
With the rise of new charter schools and homeschooling you are beginning to see more and more challenges on educational requirements for degrees.
Removing organic chemistry from a premedical curriculum makes as much sense as attempting to remove the theory of evolution - the central core idea that explains all biology, from the Biology class. However, there is pressure as people want to be in a position to claim they have degrees without the requirement of actually having to learn and understand the fundamentals of the subject matter involved.
Medical students don't need to know Organic Chemistry. It doesn't help them with their medical classes (not even Pharmacology, which I teach) and it certainly won't help them with their practice of medicine.
On the other hand, there is a sense in which the difficulty of Organic Chem is similar to the difficulty of medical school. There is a lot of detail, some of which cannot be deduced, and must simply be learned, and yet the student needs to figure out how to see the forest as well as the trees, and to reason with the material. So I can understand why a good grade in Organic Chem helps to convince an admissions committee that a student will be able to hack med school.
Gee, maybe that we are taking over all these corporations, instead of paying the executives of these federally owned corporations huge salaries, we can give them a HUGE PAYCUT and use the money saved to support scholarships for more doctors and nurses instead of investing it in additional vacation homes.
Maybe the new Fed Chairman Karl Marx has it right after all!
What kind of MD course is possible without a good dose of chemistry (organic, physical, inorganic, and bio)? Just doing o-chem in pre-med seems inadequate - I'd expect it to continue at least another year, and to have numerous biochem courses as follow-up, with a lot of lab work (quantitative & qualitative analysis).
If someone wants to work in the medical field without college level o-chem, then they should switch to nursing school. If that's too tough, then they can check for openings as hospital janitor or receptionist.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I think the obvious here is that the pre-med student is supposed to get bored enough with OCHEM to skip class, smoke a joint, and return to class with the sudden insight that, in fact, the entire thing is a charade, the industry is bullsh*t, cancer can be cured by spinach and reefer, and the entire model being purveyed by the prof was obsolete the moment the probability-field model of the atom hinted at the vibratory nature of matter. I think this may have actually happened in 1943 or so. At any rate, one learns a great deal more talking to winos who think they've achieved immortality with beer and crack, if not by the obvious health fallacy, the mentality anyway ... and one must admit these guys do live for at least comparable amounts of time as the average "drywallite ..."
I'm really late to this discussion, but here goes.
Specialization is a symptom of a rapidly increasing knowledge base. It is simply not possible for one person to have the depth of knowledge necessary for expertise in one field.
I am a surgical sub-specialist, much of my work comes from problems un/mis/whathaveyou diagnosed by other general otolaryngologists. Not general practitioners mind you, but people who are already very specialized to begin with.
BTW, I hated organic chemistry.
Very well said. Organic chem and its offspring biochem are fundamental to understanding how medications interact with the body, normal vs abnormal metabolism, and nutrition. Do you really want a doctor who just assumes the pharmaceutical company literature is correct for all patients, because he doesn't know enough to spot conflicts (or for that matter, outright snake oil)??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Some medical practices are being overhauled by popular demands in the marketplace to re-examine old, off-patent, but not truly obsolete answers. This includes therapeutic nutrition. The jokers in the deck are patent-based marketing influences and gatekeepers within the medical profession.
It always amazes me that MDs usually don't, and often seem unable, to apply basic biochemistry to therapeutic nutrition with common digestive dysfunctions that can have myriad sequalae as different nutrient are malabsorbed and more organs' performances degrade. Some important medical fads simply go in the wrong direction (e.g. common proton pump inhibitor misuse), turning mild dyspepsia problems into perplexing, unrecognized spirals of disaster. 20 - 50 cents of nutrients can potentially change an individual's world but the average doctor seems oblivious or outright misinformed on many aspects of therapeutic nutrition and digestion.
IMHO, PAs, RNs, DOs, MDs need more nutrition and better practical digestive diagnosis and treatment background as well as the licensed 4-5 yrs NDs in some states.
I think, the numbering of the cranial nerve pairs are?
Actually the cranial nerves pairs (and a couple of arteries going through the same path) all corresponds to embryonic branchial arcs. The whole area is segmented in a specific way. It's less straigh forward in primates (and humans) because then all the arcs folds together and close to form the face. But the segmentation is present in a lot of species and is much more visible in other orders "lower" along the evolution tree. In human, the nerves are exactly the same and are numbered from top to bottom, as long as you remember that numbers I and II are reserved for the olfactive and optical "nerves" (they aren't actual nerves [= peripheral nervous system], they are tracti [=central nervous system])
That's the perfect example were a little bit of embryology and comparative anatomy can help. (even if some proponents are against dissecting animals, not because of idealogical reasons - this is something I understand, I've personally never cut anything except fishes and consenting humans - but simply on the grounds that doctors will treat humans and don't need to mess with animals)
Now for their respective functions :
- well that's the difference between a good anatomy teacher and someone who just happened to get the position and doesn't make any effort at his job.
Some teachers just give you a boring list in a table with Roman numbers on one side and list of functions that you'll have to memorize because question will be asked at the exam. That's just boring and plain stupid. We had such a teacher when I was in first grade. Sadly for him, and luckily for us, he got a brain infarct and was replaced by the other kind of teacher.
There are other teacher who'll make big effort in giving lots of examples, explaining why some structures are clinically relevant, which anatomic feature have some peculiarity which will make it more important. They'll try to teach you stuff in an organised way. They'll spend some time trying to teach you first a couple of critical knowledge about how things are organised, so you understand some overall principles which are everywhere (the different layers you have from the outside to the inside, and why they make a sense from a biomechanical point of view) long before learning the precise name of everything.
Common, this is /. here. A place where half of the people can cite all the rules of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition. A place where most people consider a major offence and ask you to turn back your geek card if you can't recall exactly how many red shirts died in a specific episode of Star Trek.
Just don't tell me that the human brain can't memorise a huge chunk of useless trivia.
The only factor is how much the person cares about these fact, how much the person could have or build a small story around a fact, how much the person relates emotionally to it.
If a teacher puts efforts into transmitting a lots of examples explaining relevance, if he is eloquent, interesting to hear and fun, if he tries to transmit his passion, there are much more chances that the students will memorize what they have to.
If he just throws a table at their faces, he's incompetent, because he failed his job. The student will memorize the table's content, because they have to, and forget it as soon as they leave the exam room.
Worse part ? Several years later, they'll reach a point where that data finally makes sense and/or is useful (to go back to your example of cranial nerves, being able to list them numerically makes a nice checklist when you have to control them when doing a neurologic exam, among other uses for that information).
If the teacher just threw tables at his students, they will have long forgotten them, and they'll have to re-learn the same data. Again.
If the teacher did his job well, you still have vivid memories of some of the example he gave. The important data is still there around. If some of it is missing, you can still re-generate it
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I haven't seen one post refer to the fact that a prerequisite for Biochemistry is Organic Chemistry. If Biochemistry is not a med school requirement, it should be - and therefore, so should Orgo. Med students get about 5 minutes of biochem in 1st year classes, usually in a class like Human Physiology. Biochemistry is the foundation for all of medicine. I wouldn't argue with folks who say it is not absolutely necessary to take Orgo to "do well" in Biochem. I agree - you can get by without Orgo. However, students who take Orgo generally have a much better grasp of biochemistry.
Background .asp for the SQL that used the rowid and MINUS operators in Oracle to pluck a subset of the rows. .asp file was quickly used everywhere. It also included a debug flag that would let someone integrating it see a thorough debug trace of just how the black magic was progressing.
It was a crappy web-enabled database application.
Oracle on the back end, ASP on the front end.
User queries would return rows in the thousands and wipe out the WinNT4.0 web server, or time out.
I implemented what was essentially a pre-compiler in
To say it saved the project is an overstatement, but that one
The Point
One of the coders on the project, heaven bless the fellow, just couldn't get it.
Despite two or three walk-throughs, serious coaching, and tons of encouragement, he insisted on putting Response.Write calls all throughout that file whenever he would use it.
His intellectual bandwidth did not extend to learning how to read others' code.
Which is a shame, because he worked really hard and remains an excellent human being.
Could math have helped him? Maybe. Would spending a lot of time trying to teach him math have worked? "They's some men you just cain't reach"
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear