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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."
...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.
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.
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.
Because it gives you a thorough grounding in theoretical math, the type of stuff that I do with computers every day. I program in PHP, which you might think would be even more removed from math than .NET and Java (because it is). But there's no doubt that the analysis of algorithms and the ability to do extended, involved proofs well beyond what you learn in geometry has helped me in my programming job. Hell, even knowledge of Databases is helped by some good, college level linear algebra.
What it comes down to is the theory that someone who's well versed and knowledgeable in a lot of things is going to be better than someone who is specialized in just one thing. These people learn how to think rather than learn how to program, and in the end they're better for it. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, as it were.
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. Now I work in a hospital doing biomedical research. I see a great deal of talented physicians, but it really surprises me how many of the old guard (and plenty of the young blood) are ignorant on important topics relevant to medicine today. While organic chemistry classes in and of themselves don't remedy this sort of problem, I think that those who succeed in them generally tend to be the kinds of people who can keep their minds open and who are able to learn into their old age.
Do you know what satire is?
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.
The "idiots" just cheat or do whatever they have to, to get that degree.
It stops nothing. Seriously, how many times have you gone to a Doctor and said to yourself, "This guy is an idiot."?
I've had a doctor diagnose a broken rib as pancreatitis, spent over $10k paying for doctors to diagnose a problem that I eventually figured out MYSELF with just some research on the Web(verified by 2 other doctors afterwards) and had a doctor misdiagnose a problem, then make it worse by prescribing something that exacerbated the problem.
If an idiot REALLY wants to be a doctor, he will become a doctor.
A more stringent oversight system would be more useful.
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.
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?
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.
Satire? Of course not; why burden CS students with silly classes on English or Literature when they won't even need to know what a metaphor is?
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? The only difference between a physicist or a chemist and a doctor is the subject matter; They all face unsolved questions and will only be able reach conclusions through deductive reasoning after considering the evidence available to them. While it is certainly unethical for doctors to experiment wildly with their patients, I'm sure that many slashdotters have heard the phrase "let's try medication X.." or "I'm going to run a few tests and then.."
Doctors have to think like scientists. Perhaps another class similar to o-chem in difficulty but more relevant to the medical profession is in order?
A side note: I have worked with several MD-PhDs and they are the cream of the crop (with one or two very ugly exceptions).
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.
The second semester of O chem is mostly synthesis which is useless to physicians.
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.) It's a useful ability for doctors to have.
(Me, I was premed until I discovered how easy computer science was and switched my major.)
-- Alastair
I suppose... but you aren't being very scientific in your analysis of the situation; seeing as how you are using anecdotes as evidence. That being said, if knowing and understanding organic chemistry is not a fundamental part of doctoring then it is a waste of time and money going through the process of studying it.
People will quickly forget much of what they have learned if they don't constantly re-enforce their memories. For this reason I am also dubious as to the fact that Engineers and IT people often have to take English and Social Science courses in college or university so that they can supposedly become better communicators, more logical, etc. I suppose I need to do some research as to the efficacy of teaching less relevant courses of a person's major. My own personal experience is that I have seen good quality IT people in school who weren't very logical when it came to understanding abstract logical concepts, English grammar, etc. They went through the motions of taking the course and they passed, but they didn't seem to get anything out of it.
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?
I think the real question should be: "Is this Organic Chem RELEVANT to the job of being a ______? (insert career)" I'm an electrical engineer, and I had to take Organic Chem. Why?!?!? My job consists of wires, resistors, and gate arrays... not a single protein or amino in sight.
I can understand taking basic Chem 101 or Physics 101 or History 101 to gain an understanding of these subjects, but I don't see any value in taking any higher-level courses unless those courses have actual use for that person's future job as an Engineer or Doctor. I consider my time spent in Organic Chemistry a complete waste of money (approximately $3000 of tuition).
(Of course that may be the point - a college is a business after all - any chance to gain more money out of the customers' wallets, even if that means requiring not-needed classes.)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
The plural of anecdote is not data, yet you're only offering the singular of anecdote. As a student at one of these "best med shools", it gives me some pleasure to inform you that you're wrong about who gets into the *best* schools. Now it may be true that those who get into the *rest* are as you suggest, but I don't have any objective data either way on that.
If the guys at NVIDIA who designed their chip packaging would have been more chemists instead of electrical engineers, NVIDIA would have saved $@50 M in downwrites. If the guys at NASA who designed the Apollo 1 capsule would have been more chemists than engineers they would have understood how filling something with 18 psi oxygen is different from 4 psi oxygen, and Gus Grissom would have been the first man on the moon. If the guys at Boeing who designed the wire running through the fuel tank of the 747 would have understood more chemistry, TWA 800 wouldn't be in pieces.
Please let me know how many more examples you'd like why chemistry isn't all useless for engineers.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
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.
I've heard this before. It seems to be an urban legend because I have never seen any evidence that Math improves problem solving skills (outside of the field of Mathematics of course) but I've heard many people make that claim. Calculus, for example, may be good for understanding how to maintain a certain speed behind a car while driving in the fog on a curved road, but most people can develop this skill better by actually taking driving lessons. As with a lot of posts here you make your point but don't back it up with any evidence. I wish people who were studying the sciences would be more scientific and logical in their arguments.
I can't agree with you more. I teach organic chemistry and I am the Pre-med advisor. I have spent time talking to physicians, med school admission folks, etc. and the best answers I have are as follows 1) its necessary to properly study biochemistry which IS really necessary for the modern study of medicine. 2) you cannot memorize your way through organic chemistry. The mechanisms, syntheses, and reactions that you have to figure out, organize in your mind and THINK about. if the instructor is doing their job you really should not be able get through organic chemistry without critically thinking and applying your powers of observation, which are two traits I am sure we can all appreciate in a physician. other posts on this topic have indicated that organic is not as useful as biochem. I agree, but you need organic to study biochem. I for one, teach my organic class with a biochemical and biological slant. Since most of my students are pre-med or dent or vet, etc. they have more interest in the biological and biochemical so i keep their interest in my organic class by constantly trying to use examples that relate to those areas. for the most part it works better than the old organic chemistry I took when I was an undergraduate student. those are my 13 and a half cents worth of opinion. but I agree with this post and if you didn't say it first, I was getting ready to do so.
That just might be a simplification...maybe. In most of those cases if the guys at Q had thought of and tested X they would not have failed.
Even as engineers, living, eating and breathing the subject matter, things get overlooked. Particularly when we're solving a hard problem, solve the hard problem and go get drunk, but do not step back and thing about the big picture. Particularly when you're on a schedule, particularly when you are projected managed to death, particularly when your job has been divide and conquered to atoms for you, as is so often the case in the corporate world.
Organic chemistry is not necessary for any of those problems, nor is there anything in that subject that would have saved the day. Usually bad stuff happens when "safe" assumptions are made in a hurry. It's a big issue many of us face when doing our job.
It's not that we lack the skill or the tools, it's that we are not encouraged to use them. Doctors, in my experience, suffer from the same types of problems.
Dude. I'm an upper-level comp sci major, and I can tell you that 87% of everything in computer science does not use calculus. The real weed-out math that determines if you can hack Computer Science is discrete mathematics: predicate calculus, set theory, functions and relations, graph theory, formal languages, and theory of computation.
Which are all, coincidentally, taught at my uni in a single course at the 200 level. Some moron decided to let all the code monkeys get to second year before getting the cold bitchslap of mathematical reality.
Because the purpose of an undergraduate university education is not to get a person a job, it's to help them become *educated* and able to explore many things to depths beyond a casual survey of fields. Of course, actually being *educated* (as opposed to just getting a degree) does help in many, many ways with jobs, but it's not really the point.
If you want a degree to get a job, that's what grad school is for. You have the rest of your life to become narrow, why make it happen sooner?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
"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?"
Actually medical students need both skills. Once one gets into medical school there is a torrent of information that one has to acquire. 'trying to drink from a firehose' is the old saw. The medical student _needs_ to have the brute force memorization skills in order to not flunk out of medical school. The scientific type reasoning comes when you first bump into patients and you are trying to figure out what is wrong with them (diagnosis). That is really where problem solving and deductive reasoning come to fore (and intuition and empathy as well. Just try and get a straight story from the average guy on the street.)
So, I think the 'rite of passage' that is organic chemistry is fine. But then I'm one of the odd balls that does research. I had my old organic book (Morrison and Boyd, 3rd ed, circa 1972) out just the other day to re-learn some things half forgotten.
Enough fun. Back to grant writing.
Duke, M.D., Ph.D. out
No...not a troll. This guy has excellent points regarding engineering. We could also put the shoe on the other foot for the IT crowd. Wouldn't it be nice if some of the business types actually knew a little bit about the capabilities of computers, programs and networks so that they didn't make such outrageous demands on us?
But in regards to organic chemistry, physics, and the rest of the pre-med curriculum, there are several reasons for it classically:
I could go on, but this is getting a bit long already.
I took O-chem as a prereq for dental school. O-chem was the ONLY course that required as much effort as the first year of professional school - the first year of any professional program is typically overloaded to wash out the people that didn't deserve to be there.
Biochem ranks as the most difficult (for me) class I ever took (1st year dental school). I remember the instructor getting a standing ovation for flawlessly reciting through phosphorolation, which was like "peter piper picked a peck..." except far worse. Another weed-out was Pharmacy - it had a large section called the "bug parade" in which we were forced to memorize which antibiotic worked against which bug. This *is* relevant, but in practice you get your information from current literature. These courses were good for weeding out idiots, but I can't say I remember any of the crap we were forced to temporarily memorize, nor does it ever really come into use.
There are some doctors who got their degrees simply by being good at going to school and passing tests. Plenty of docs are basically idiots, but not in a way that would have caused them to fail - people good at details but who miss the big picture. I can't really say I know of a way to weed those people out or even if they should be. Each step along the way serves it's purpose.
The bottom line is that professional programs *evolved* to their current form for a reason and radical reorganization is a recipe for disaster.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
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 ]