ATAR Notes: Forum
Uni Stuff => Faculties => Health sciences => Topic started by: saheh on August 15, 2012, 07:55:26 pm
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hey everyone
so I just want to know how much of med school is like chem based/pharmacology etcetc like how dense those sort of subjects are?
as I don't have anyone I could talk to about it that I know.. and what are the other subjects like??
Thanks!
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First semester has a lot of Biochem and Pharma is relevant for pretty much your whole career :) Hence, vce chem is a prereq :D
(edit: typo)
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That sort of stuff dies down in your clinical years though. People start caring less about all that, partly because it's assumed knowledge, and partly because it isn't clinically relevant in some cases. Actual 'chemistry' is quite rare in Medicine - it's more biology. Even the so-called pharmacology we learn is fairly dumbed down, pretty much just to the biological aspects of it (everything's at a receptor level rather than atoms and bonds and whatnot). I haven't used the majority of what I learnt in chemistry in VCE. Don't get me wrong though - it's still very heavy content just due to how much there is to cover when you talk about the entire human body. Essentially, it's breadth, not depth. The entire human body studied via a breadth of different subjects (anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, histology, even sociology) without too much depth (well, generally speaking - but sometimes the expected detail can be quite excessive).
However, once you hit your clinical years there's not really any actual subjects. It's all just clinical medicine, learning the symptoms of each disease, the tests you run for them, and the ways you treat it. In amongst all that, all the stuff you learned from earlier years from pharmacology and physiology will come back and be relevant somewhere within that framework. So the depth to which you study it is really up to you, but the expected level is generally quite superficial, with many choosing to ignore it quite a lot. They're much more interested in whether you can see a real patient, figure out the diagnosis and give them the right treatment - not explain how each of those correlates on a molecular level. So I've had many friends who really hated Medicine at the beginning come into the clinical years and enjoy it a lot more due to the practical nature of it then.
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Is Physics necessary for med course?
If not, why is it in biomed as a compulsory subject and in GAMSAT?
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Is Physics necessary for med course?
If not, why is it in biomed as a compulsory subject and in GAMSAT?
No
Because it is required in the GAMSAT
Because it is a basic science which most people should have an understanding of (trust me, it is relevant and it has helped throughout my 1.4 semesters of med)