A Guide to Prerequisites for Medical School Part 3: Physics

Last year, I wrote two articles on the prerequisites for medical school, one for General Biology and another for Organic Chemistry here in Associated Content/Yahoo! Contributor Network. So, this is a continuation for another prerequisite, namely physics, which is "surprisingly" an important course required by medical schools in United States.

Proper Ways of Approaching Physics

Many students try to study physics the same way they study general chemistry. In a way, this isn't entirely wrong since physics courses do require students to complete many problems that heavily rely on mathematic calculations. But, physics problems can be "more" difficult in the sense that setting up physics problems consists of strong grasp of concepts, such as free-body diagrams.

The solution to this challenge is to keep up with the materials by reading before the class and reading after the class. Pre-reading serves to introduce you on what types of concepts that will be covered on that day. Post-reading forces you to make the comprehension of those concepts to be permanent. Like organic chemistry, physics appears easier when someone explains to you, so post-reading helps to solidify the lecture into something that you can fully utilize for yourself.

Physics Can Help in Medicine (No Lie)

When students take physics to fulfill the requirements for medical schools, they do not immediately realize the reason as to why spend an entire year to learn physics. It is true that classical mechanics is not really applicable to medicine. It is also correct that no physician (or any health care provider for that matter) will sit down with a calculator to try to find the acceleration of motor vehicle prior to an accident (that's for insurance companies and other related people).

On the other hand, there are some biological topics that are closely tied to physics, including Poiseuille's Law with blood flow rate, bone compression/tension, and vision and optics (concave/convex lens). There are other topics as well, and while not all physics courses will adjust the curriculum to include more medical applications, it is recommended that the students try to tell themselves that their physics knowledge will be helpful to medicine, especially with physiology.

Improving the Conceptual Understanding

While it may not be obvious, understanding physics allows premed students to have a firmer grasp of biology and chemistry because physics is the basis of all sciences. It is not always that physics is directly applicable to what the students study, but more so that once they have survived physics, other sciences become more manageable. This is similar to saying that taking a philosophy course helps one to write a better paper because the "thinking process" improves from reading primary literatures by philosophers like Kant and Locke.

Brief Summary of Personal Experiences

I understand that unlike other two articles, this one was more "article"-like than a personal account, so here is my brief personal account of one year of introductory physics course that was algebra-based (not calculus-based).

Textbook : College Physics by Alan Giambattista, Betty Richardson, Robert C. Richardson

The textbook has very well-written explanations, which vastly differed from my previous physics textbook in high school that was just plain awful. The problems are difficult, and in some cases, a bit more unreasonable than what was actually covered in the lecture. I felt that earlier chapters on kinematics, momentum, and waves were explained much better than later chapters in electricity and magnetism. I recall having to spend about four hours on a single problem involving Kirchhoff's Law because the book never really "defined" how I should use that law in the circuit problems. Magnetism is a tricky topic as well, and my best advice to anyone is to definitely utilize hyperphysics for magnetism since it is very thorough and accurate.