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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."
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.
Your missing the point. Even though you may go through your life not using all the math you have learned the point is Math helps you sharpen your problem solving skills which is 99% of what a CS student will use.
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
Nothing is funnier than the truth. During my undergraduate career I worked for the Chemistry department and it was my job to watch some of these hopeless pre-med students suffer through o-chem lab. Needless to say, I feel a lot better knowing that a good share of the more inept ones got filtered out so early on in the game.
See, I think these people are asking the wrong question. The question isn't whether pre-meds should suffer through orgo - the question is whether chemistry majors should have to suffer the whiny, grade-grubbing pre-meds who slow the class down and turn it into a brainless, memorization-based weed-out class.
My degree's in chemistry, and the classes got a lot more fun and interesting once the pre-meds got shunted off into the "lite" track of classes like P-chem. We could have actual discussions about concepts for a change.
The problem with PAs and NPS (at least, from what I see as an outsider) is that the barriers to entry are still quite high, but not with a correspondingly high "payoff."
Doctors make obscene amounts of money, while those working below them seem to have a hard time just scraping by...
A popular perception, but let's see what the Bureau of Labor Statistics says. Mean Annual earnings:
Family Physician: $137,119
Physician Assistant: $74,980
Registered Nurse: $57,280
Sure, the doctor makes more than the PA or RN, but not "obscene amounts" more, and arguably well within a range corresponding to a higher level of responsibility. I'll also argue that even the lowest wage on that list is hardly "scraping by".
To head off a possible counter-point, a surgeon makes significantly more on average ($282,504 with >1 yr experience) but also has a massively higher level of responsibility and liability. When PA's and nurses have similar responsibility and especially similar liability to physicians, then they should get similar pay. Until then, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
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.
This whole debate is rather silly. The blog quotes the academic dean of Harvard's med school as saying the second semester of organic chem should be more medically oriented. He didn't say organic chem should be eliminated. Others may say that but they must be very misinformed.
Organic chemistry is the foundation for biochemistry, just as general chemistry is the foundation for organic chemistry. The typical medical school or biological sciences grad school pathway is:
general chem
orgo
biochem
Increasingly, medical schools are requiring biochem as a prerequisite. Once in med school, students study a lot of biochemistry as it relates to the human body. This is foundational knowledge to help us understand how drugs interact with the body, how metabolism and catabolism work, how cells are structured, how the nervous system communicates with the tissues, etc.
To eliminate organic chemistry would make it much more difficult if not impossible to teach proper biochemistry. How can you understand biochemistry if you don't understand polarity, oxidation/reduction, activation energy, etc.? General chem present this material but certainly not in the same depth as organic chem, at least as it applies to organic molecules.
There is a career path for those who don't want or need to study organic chemistry and subsequent topics: nursing. As for doctors, though, let them continue to study the hard sciences and, hopefully, also achieve a good wholistic understanding of health.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Getting a job in some narrow field is what trade schools are for. Getting a liberal arts education is what a university is for. See wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education