How hard is med school?

Bigredmed
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:59:57 +0000

Generally (though not always) you’ll need to take at least one semester of calculus and one semester of statistics to meet the entrance requirements for most med schools. However there are a few schools that are may require more or less.

In terms of actual clinical practice, basic algebra is a necessity - I use it every day to calculate how much IV fluids to give, what components to give in total parenteral nutrition and in how many calories per kilo a premature infant in the NICU is getting - if you’re going to take care of pediatric patients or go into anesthesia then you need to be able to perform these calculations quickly and accurately. For kids, every medicine is dosed based on weight, so as a pediatrician I’m constantly running calculations, even if it’s something simple as telling a mother how much tylenol to give her child.

If you wish to go into radiology then high level physics and calculus are needed to understand the implications of radiation and the effects on the body and the quality of images obtained. In other fields, there are certainly valuable insights to be gained by understanding the theory behind calculus but it’s a rare instance that would ask for you to do things like find the derivative of the curve or perform integrations.