Maybe I'd Prefer the Doctor Who Got the 'A' in Orgo

Interesting article in the NY Times which put the spotlight on a number of students who are getting into medical school without taking typical undergraduate science prerequisites or the MCAT. I know friends from college that looked upon both of these "rites of passage" with great dread, particularly organic chemistry, which had the reputation as a "killer" course along the same lines of Capital Markets at Wharton.

It's an interesting approach, built upon the theory that presuming that the candidates are fairly bright already (the applicants who get in through the "non-traditional" route come from schools such as Amherst, Princeton, Brown Wesleyan and Williams and have strong SAT and undergraduate GPA scores), and they go through a form of boot camp which serves as a turbo-catch up of science curriculum they might have missed. The applicants are still held to the standards of doing their Step 1 and Board exams, so it's not as if there's not a degree of quality control before these folks go out to see patients.

It does raise the question of the real importance of what's deemed as compulsory "pre-med" education. Or put another way, if it's not all that necessary for these folks, why should the rest of the medical students be held to it? The analogy (albeit imperfect) is business school, which has no real prerequisites besides, in most cases, good work experience - and I fully agree with that. You don't need to go into any top-notch business school knowing how to do accounting or financial modeling or marketing; these are things they teach you during the first semester. So for those idiots who went to Wharton's undergraduate program who totally wasted their.... oh wait, never mind.

Jesting aside, undergraduate business schools are great for getting you a nice job post-college, which then get you into a B-school, where you learn very little incrementally from undergraduate business school. Waste of money? Not really, but that's for another blog post.

Going back to our science-ignorant medical students, I'm liking what I hear about opening the doors to liberal arts students who have strong interpersonal skills who will become "well-rounded, caring, inquisitive healers". What I get a little nervous about is what's articulated by Elizabeth Adler, one of the non-traditional students who states (a little pretentiously in my opinion): “I didn’t want to waste a class on physics, or waste a class on orgo. The social determinants of health are so much more pervasive than the immediate biology of it.”

Well, Lizzie, if you're my oncologist, I'd be concerned about you thinking that learning about organic chemistry would've been a waste. And I sure don't want you pontificating about how my socioeconomic standing impacts my life-expectancy when I'm having a cardiac episode.