I Hate Science and Math...Can I still be a Doctor?

pmyen
Sat, 20 Jan 2007 12:33:21 +0000

I am a medical school professor so let me weigh in. Science is an integral part of medicine so the premedical courses in college help prepare students for the medical training. Showing a certain level of competence in science in mandatory for admission to medical school. In fact, performance in them are important critieria for medical school admissions. What is your attraction to medicine? I think in addition to humanitarian and interpersonal benefits of medicine, I do think there has to be some underlying interest in the science of medicine. Why do people become ill? What can be done aout it? What are the reasons for the particular treatment? Someone that has no curiousity about these type of questions will not be an effective clnician.

I do medical research and we are in a golden age of molecular biology. There will be sophisticated and exciting new treatments in the next decades that will require physicians to have some understanding of molecular genetics, physiology, neuroscience, pharmacology, bioinformatics, and statistics to name a few subjects. Even if you are a practicing physician in the community, you will need the tools and ability to learn and analyze new information in order to keep up in your profession. Also, you will be an interpretor of science to the lay community as I believe many scientific advances will raise ethical and economic issues for our society.

By the way, my son is a History major in college and pre-med. I have encouraged him to take science courses and also to participate in research projects. Although his natural bent is towards the humanities, he enjoys using different thinking processes to analyze problems. I would say to go into your pre-med science classes without any pre-conceptions. You may find a professor or a scientific question that may transform your attitude. Your experience in science in college may be very different than the one you had in high school. I thought I would be an English major in college, and was turned on to medical research by an exciting summer experience in a research laboratory. I now spend the majority of my time in medical research although I do teaching and some clinical care. Harold Varmus, who was a previous director of the NIH and a Nobel laureate, majored in Medieval Literature and was in the middle of a Ph.D program in literature when he decided to switch into medicine. I have read some interviews of him, and he credits his training in the humanities for some of the creativity and communication skills needed to be a successful medical scientist.