Why is This Class Necessary?
Do Pre-Meds Really Need That Year of Organic Chemistry?
Feel free to replace this, mentally, with physics, and it can be applied to other endeavors. But here’s a joke that was posted on this topic at slashdot (which I found via another conduit)
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.”
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organic chem, which I didn’t have a particularly hard time with did not prepare me for biochemistry, which I had an extremely hard time with.
This may have been a function of the quality of the professors teaching the two classes, however.
Like ecoli, I also found that organic chemistry did not in anyway prepare me for biochemistry. The only thing it did was weed out people who can’t pass organic chemistry; and if you can’t pass organic chemistry you almost certainly can’t pass biochemistry (at least at my university). I found biochemistry much harder — I got A’s in both organic chemistry classes but ended up with a C in biochemistry.
I don’t think I ever used any organic chemistry in medical school. There was an occasional reference to different side-groups (such as carboxyl groups) etc., but it was always a casual mention. I can think of a lot of other classes which were much more applicable to medical school: genetics, cell biology, histology, microbiology, and biochemistry (which some schools require). With the exception of biochemistry, none of these are required prerequisites for medical school, but all of them will show up in your medical education.
Apparently, your college failed to mention that as physicians, you may be dealing with chemicals: e.g. drugs. For some peculiar reason, you may want to know blood chemistry, drug interactions, etc.
However, pleading in the alternative, these classes save the lives of professors who still owe nasty godfathers education loans and need the work . . . or they’re pushing up daisies.
In my grad years, my friend John and I were T.A.s of a freshmen ‘pre-med’ physics class. One of the HW problems assigned by the profs — no doubt to appeal to their sense of medical intuition — was to calculate how high an IV bag must be held above a patient’s arm to equalize the pressure and allow the fluid to flow in. One of John’s students answered: 2 km!
“Apparently, your college failed to mention that as physicians, you may be dealing with chemicals: e.g. drugs. For some peculiar reason, you may want to know blood chemistry, drug interactions, etc.”
As a physician I could care less about which electrons go where and in what order. I don’t care about the exact organic pathway by which this drug or that drug is metabolized. CYP450 3A4 oxidase in the liver with a half-life of 12 hours is sufficient. Even if you wanted to know specific organic pathways you’d have to venture way outside of medical literature to find such information.