why do we need math to be a doctor?

BU Medical Sciences
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Well certain aspects of math and physics allow you to understand aspects of physiology- such as blood velocity and turbulence. Aspects of the heart and blood pumping, cardiac output, etc.
 
crossfit4lyfe said:
Well certain aspects of math and physics allow you to understand aspects of physiology- such as blood velocity and turbulence. Aspects of the heart and blood pumping, cardiac output, etc.
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which can be taught/quickly learned while taking physio. You are required to take math because they need their greens.
 
At max you'd need 1 year of math. We're not talking linear algebra here. It's just solving problems with formulas. If you are struggling that means you're not doing enough practice problems.
 
Depends where you take calc, at some schools the exams test intelligence more than familiarity/study hours
 
efle said:
Depends where you take calc, at some schools the exams test intelligence more than familiarity/study hours
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True, I suppose some may be harder. A great amount of it still boils down to studying. But anyway, most schools do not require a year of calc, just mathematics, which could be stats/precalc/what-have-you if calculus is truly a weed out class at your school
 
SnakeOilForSale said:
At max you'd need 1 year of math. We're not talking linear algebra here. It's just solving problems with formulas. If you are struggling that means you're not doing enough practice problems.
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Im just not good at math. I wont ever use math as an attending anyway.
 
Stats is pretty important if you decide to take up research. You'll need to know how to analyze data and figure out if your results are significant enough to warrant a new therapy, drug, etc
 
General knowledge said:
Im just not good at math. I wont ever use math as an attending anyway.
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It's the same argument as "I'm just not good at orgo and I'm never going to directly use it anyway"

There are very few people who are naturally good at things. The rest of us just have to buckle down and learn it.
 
SnakeOilForSale said:
True, I suppose some may be harder. A great amount of it still boils down to studying. But anyway, most schools do not require a year of calc, just mathematics, which could be stats/precalc/what-have-you if calculus is truly a weed out class at your school
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Im taking stats not calc ands it very tedious .
 
General knowledge said:
Im taking stats not calc ands it very tedious .
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You will need an understanding of stats as an attending to understand medical articles. Physicians don't stop learning the second they graduate. The more you try to argue to yourself how useless these things are, the harder it will be to appreciate/learn them.
 
General knowledge said:
True. However that would be abstract math and theory not calc and stats which more process based
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That's just not true. Sure, you can learn it purely from a mechanistic, process-based manner. But if you don't understand the abstract reasoning behind why you are performing a certain operation, it becomes much more difficult to apply them to problem solving. I suspect this is why so many people have problems with related rates and applying things they have learned to new, challenging problems that they haven't encountered before.
 
I doubt a person can handle much of anything if they can't grasp mathematics

If you have to ask why we need math you probably don't understand it
 
General knowledge said:
Please do not attempt to insult me or misquote my post in a lame way to try to make me look foolish.

Thank you.
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As I have said before and as many of the other posters have stated, you need to get through it.

You simply don't want to do the classes because as you stated above, you're not performing well. Is that how you are going to act with physics? general chemistry when you are calculating molar ratios?

You need to learn math because you need to be ready to conduct fast calculations on the MCAT regarding scientific notation.
 
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General knowledge said:
Im just not good at math. I wont ever use math as an attending anyway.
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Are you planning to ever provide any amount of medical care?

Surgery? Math
Pharmacology? Math
Practically anything involving medicine? A heck of a lot of math

Are you beginning to see a trend?
 
Math develops problem solving skill which is required for reaching a diagnosis.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
hardly any schools even require math more than college algebra, which is required by any degree anyways... and if any schools require math it's calc 1 and that's cake... you got a long road ahead of you
 
amad01 said:
hardly any schools even require math more than college algebra, which is required by any degree anyways... and if any schools require math it's calc 1 and that's cake... you got a long road ahead of you
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Thought med school want 1 year. But it matters if u go to a carp school or not. At my school all business majors must taje calc 1. But for some they require a class called "business math" which asks questions like "what is 7 percent of $230"
 
being bad at math can kill a patient
we use potent drugs on a daily basis
 
I've shadowed ortho, interven cards, and EM. All 3 use math daily. Ortho because you need to know physics of how MS system works and can be injured. Interven cards because of you need to understand how blood pressure works. EM because you have to read lab results and interpret the numbers. I'm positive every specialty and subspecialty requires the use of math daily, as has been stated in this thread already.
 
Yeah, if anything in the prereqs is really useless it's probably the more obscure physics + nuclear chemistry
 
Ace Khalifa said:
I've shadowed ortho, interven cards, and EM. All 3 use math daily. Ortho because you need to know physics of how MS system works and can be injured. Interven cards because of you need to understand how blood pressure works. EM because you have to read lab results and interpret the numbers. I'm positive every specialty and subspecialty requires the use of math daily, as has been stated in this thread already.
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If you say so....

Hahaha he said bp. I'I'll make sure to buy an abacus tomorrow
 
efle said:
Yeah, if anything in the prereqs is really useless it's probably the more obscure physics + nuclear chemistry
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Agreed. You won't really use any of the prereqs in medicine. They are just hurdles you need to get over, to show you can. But to be honest if you had to rank prereqs in term of importance for this career, math wouldn't be last. I sure use math a lot more than non-mammalian biology, inorganic chemistry, etc.
 
Law2Doc said:
Rad onc and nuclear medicine folks use these, I suspect.
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Maybe to understand how their machines work in broad strokes, but I doubt any doc has had to pause and solve a Gaussian flux integral or predict the most likely positions of an orbiting electron before proceeding with their MRI.

I also think people who like learning about BCPM are more likely to enjoy learning medicine, so maybe it protects them from accepting pure humanities majors who didn't really know how they felt about learning boatloads of anatomy/physio/pharma/etc
 
General knowledge said:
Im really annoyed by this. Math is Bringing my gpa down and i know i wont use stuff as a doctor anyway.
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To make sure they don't have a bunch of lazy people, the undedicated, and imbeciles applying to medical schools. Why do you think they make any pre-req hard? why do you think they call them weed out courses?
 
You never know when knowing how to calculate an eigenvector or solve an ODE may be useful lol.
 
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