Do you actually use chemistry?

[sistermike]

Ok as you all should know, during your pre-med years you take chemistry and you study your butt off in chemistry along with many other classes for the MCAT. Ok do you really use your chemistry that much in the actual doctor job? I understand some specialties do and I understand that if you do like in depth research and stuff, you may use chemistry; but what about the typical doc, do they use chemistry?

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[edmadison]

•••quote:•••Originally posted by sistermike:
•Ok as you all should know, during your pre-med years you take chemistry and you study your butt off in chemistry along with many other classes for the MCAT. Ok do you really use your chemistry that much in the actual doctor job? I understand some specialties do and I understand that if you do like in depth research and stuff, you may use chemistry; but what about the typical doc, do they use chemistry?•••••In general, practicing physicians don't use much chemistry. There are some exceptions, however. Critical care and ER docs must think about acid-base chemistry quite a bit. Most docs don't think about the nuts and bolts of chemistry, they just think about the outcome of a process or pathway. I can tell you that a good foundation in chemistry is quite helpful in medical school. It makes it easier to understand some of the metabolic pathways.

Ed

 

[davidgreen]

You will NEVER use chemistry in med school. NEVER.

Let me repeat: CHEMISTRY IS USELESS IN MED SCHOOL.

It will not help you understand any pathways.

People like to lie to each other and say that knowing Orgo well will help you in Biochem BUT THAT IS UNTRUE.

Now then, knowing BIOchemistry from undergrad will help you a ton at med school during the first year. So many biochem majors at my med school had one less class to worry about once they got here. I, on the other hand, was a film major, so biochem was totally foreign to me.

Keep in mind, however, that biochem is TOTALLY USELESS for the practice of medicine. You'll never see it again after Step I of the boards. It will have a ZERO PERCENT IMPACT on your career. It's just a silly hoop that med students are forced to jump through.

Summary: CHEMISTRY IS WORTHLESS FOR DOCTORS. Yes, ER physicians and IM docs use "acid/base chemistry" but that has NOTHING to do with G-chem or O-chem from undergrad. NOTHING WHATSOEVER. The only carryover is knowing that a pH>7 = basic, and a pH<7 = acidic. And when you get to biological systems, you'll find that even that isn't true.

Sorry, Ed Madison - I usually love your posts. But you're WAY off the mark this time.

cheers

ALL CAPS MAN LIVES!

 

[doepug]

Sorry, I have to disagree with davidgreen on this one.

I think chemistry is very important for nearly every field of medicine, and it is exceedingly important for fields like Anesthesiology and critical care medicine. Sure, you can ride the odds and hope you don't get blasted when adding a new drug to a patient's regimen, but a sound knowledge of chemistry is essential to really understand pharmacology.

There's no escaping pharmacology, and you owe it to your patients to understand chemistry well enough to understand drug design and mechanisms of action. If you don't know orgo by this point, you'll be helpless when it comes to really understanding pharm. If you make a career out of relying on drug reps, you'll be doing your patients a disservice.

If you don't think chem is important, wait until you meet someone with respiratory/metabolic acidosis/alkalosis. There's no way to reason through that pathophysiology without knowing chemistry.

If you don't think biochem is important, wait until you meet someone with a genetic disorder. Once you see a patient with PKU, a glycogen storage disease, or any other inborn error of metabolism, you'll understand how important chemistry really is.

Despite davidgreen's arguments, I think a solid understanding of chemistry is vitally important to your success as a physician.

doepug

 

[jargon124]

•••quote:•••Originally posted by davidgreen:
•

Keep in mind, however, that biochem is TOTALLY USELESS for the practice of medicine. You'll never see it again after Step I of the boards. It will have a ZERO PERCENT IMPACT on your career. It's just a silly hoop that med students are forced to jump through.

•••••I'd have to say that the above statement is just plain false. You think that Endocrine/matabolism (among other) docs don't think about biochemistry everyday they practice?

Of course you won't need to know the details of the reactions that comprise cholesterol synthesis as a practicing doc, but I think background knowledge of general chem, organic, and biochem is essential to being a good doc. In any case it can't hurt - much!

 

[Winged Scapula]

•••quote:•••Originally posted by davidgreen:
•
Keep in mind, however, that biochem is TOTALLY USELESS for the practice of medicine. You'll never see it again after Step I of the boards. It will have a ZERO PERCENT IMPACT on your career. It's just a silly hoop that med students are forced to jump through.

•••••Huh? Besides the obvious patients with endocrine disorders, knowing Hepatic Biochem has been rather helpful in ascertaining what the liver is doing s/p transplant (or in hepatic failure).

I use Acid-Base Chemistry everyday in the SICU - interpreting ABGs, does this patient need an insulin drip, why is this patient hypoventilating (because he's been transfused, the citrate making him alkalotic, reducing his respiratory drive), etc.

You may not need to know it in the detail taught in medical school but to say that its useless in the practice of everyday medicine was the same *&^& my medical school fed me in order to give me a substandard education. It simply isn't true.

 

[Mad Scientist]

I agree with doepug. The question is not whether you use chemistry on a daily basis, but whether you need to understand chemistry in order to have a fundamental understanding of what you DO use on a daily basis. You need to understand the biochemistry of many very common disorders (diabetes, atherosclerosis, hypertriglyceridemia, many genetic diseases) in order to make decisions about their treatment. And you DEFINITELY need to understand chemistry in order to get down the basics of pharmacology, which after all could be argued is the very thing that distinguishes us as physicians.

The physician is supposed to be one of the learned professions--that is, we make decisions based on understanding of fundamental processes combined with clinical experience. Physicians are NOT supposed to be simple technicians, handing out drugs for various ailments based on formulas worked out by other people. There is a big difference in philosophy between those approaches, and in order to be a true professional you have to have fundamental knowledge of biology (biochemistry, physiology, and anatomy) in order to make good decisions.

 

[entropy]

i still havn't started residency, but at least in med school, i learn by 2 ways, thinking about something when i see it the first time, and then learning by repetition.

I think that some chemistry is useful in the clinical years, such as acid-base, and biochem will make the first year of med school less stressful...

but do you really need to know how to synthesize an organic compound, or know avagadro's # ?

probably not.....

i think it would be best to maybe have a sememster of chemistry, and one semester of biochem, and spend the rest of the time having fun...

but, unfortunately, medical schools have a ton of beaurocracy, and red tape.....

hope this helps....

 

[Acro Yali]

Chemistry in medical school? Not that useful. But, the knowing the basic mechanisms of chemistry definitely helps. I mean, most people can barely remember what enantiomers, oxidation reduction reactions,...etc. Those are probably useless. But knowing about the formation of oxygen radicals, background in acid-base reactions...etc helps. What I have found so far is that a typical pre-med curriculum doesn't reflect med school curriulum..unless you specifically take classes like microbiology, endocrinology, physiology, pharmacology, biochemistry.

 

[vhl]

I think med school would have been difficult without having had chemistry. We forget how much of the knowledge becomes intrinsic, and we don't even know we are using it. It's especially true in pharm and biochem, and acid base. These topics underly most of the pathology we learn, and if we don't know what lipophilic is, or that certain drugs are enantiomers of each other, or that Henderon and Hasselbach just wanted to drive students CRAZY, we'd spend too much time looking up all these darn words to figure out what they mean .

Now calculus, on the other hand...

 

[Toadkiller Dog]

It is true enough that most of the fine details of inorganic and organic chemistry will be forgotten and never used again once you become a physician.

But you are a COMPLETE ***** if you think that you don't use the basic big-picture concepts of chemistry EVERY DAY in medical school and in practice.

Things like LeChatlier's Principle (why is urea toxic, folks?), what an enzyme is and does, acid/base chemistry, how ions behave, why certain things bind to DNA (anybody remember epoxide formation from orgo?) and other crap like that gets so ingrained into you that you don't even realize you're using it.

Every single drug you put into a patient's body works on these chemical and biochemical concepts. If you don't understand the reasoning behind the way they work, you are no better than a Nurse Practitioner.

And one more thing to the above poster--how the *&^!! are you going to understand biochemistry without basic inorganic and organic?

 

[sistermike]

Ok, so what I got from all of this is that I will use chemistry but I won't need to go so indepth. I love chemistry and I find it rather easy but I find no use in learning the composition makeup of carbohydrates and synthesization reactions. Well I guess if you are going into a chemistry field it would be needed.

 

[Fah-Q]

I guess you need chemistry a little bit for the reasons listed above. However, this will all be thoroughly taught to you while in med school if you go to a good school (i.e., any US med school). You can go ahead and forget about 95% of chemistry you were forced to learn in undergrad...its useless.

 

[ApacheIndian]

Oh yeah dude I once saw a resident save a guy's life with his deft skills and a Bunson Burner it was nuts