"Today we “weed out” potentially wonderful doctors through a demoralizing maze of basic sciences that more often resembles the Hunger Games than a sensible recruitment process."
How accurate is this article.
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/it-s-time-to-retire-premed/
I would agree on some points and disagree on others.
1. Yes, most of physics is probably irrelevant to medicine. But some is very relevant. My UG had a non-calculus-based physics course specifically designed for life science majors, so this was largely a non-issue for people at my school. The new MCAT has also de-emphasized physics relative to the other subjects, so this is also a step in the right direction.
2. I disagree that chemistry is not important. Concepts in intro chemistry form a critical foundation for the understanding of Ochem, which in turn forms the foundation for biochem and finally pharmacology. I suppose you could just memorize everything in pharma and get by, but having a strong grasp of underlying concepts should help immensely and allow for more effective decision making when it comes to prescribing meds to patients.
3. I'm dubious about the Mt Sinai HuMed study. It isn't entirely clear whether the standard student and HuMed groups are comparable, and therefore what conclusions can be drawn about their relative performance. For example, how do we know that the HuMed students weren't actually more highly selected because of the special and experimental status of the program? Beyond this, iirc, there was actually a statistically significant, but small, difference in step scores between the two groups, with HuMed at the disadvantage.
The real problems the author seems to be pointing out are:
1. Grading on a curve to arbitrarily cull pre-med students. This is a fair point, but fixing this would not require changing the pre-med curriculum, just how the individual classes are graded.
2. Medical school applications have become ridiculously competitive because of high demand and not enough supply. Again, changing the pre-med curriculum would not affect this problem. A potential solution could be opening new schools/programs that are obligatory PCP-track to address the relative lack of primary care providers compared to specialists. These programs could have lower tuition as a motivator, although with competition as high as it is, this may not be necessary. The lower competitiveness for entry would probably be enough incentive in itself.
