Being a postbac premed, I constantly ask myself why.  Why am I putting myself through the sadomasochism of premedical studies? Why does the third equivalence point in a polyprotic acid titration not follow the same rules as the first two? Why am I dreaming about RLC circuits (there no rest for the weary even in sleep)?  One of my most persistent questions has been, why is General Physics part of the premedical curriculum? In two semesters of General Physics, I have learned one thing I can directly relate from curriculum to clinic.  And I learned it from Physics for Dummies (it concerned calculating blood pressure in an aneurysm using Bernoulli’s Equation).  I can complain at length about how useless this course is for premedical students, what a waste of time and money it is, and how insane it is that there is a class called “Physics of the Human Body” at Columbia, yet we still take General Physics. Yet this kind of self-pity and frustration is counterproductive.

At the start of the semester, I set out on a mission to prove to myself that there was a good reason for me to be taking physics in order to become a physician.  Have I proved this yet? No. A working knowledge of physics can be very valuable to a medical education…in that there is an MCAT Physics section.  Beyond that, few doctors and medical students I’ve spoken with have actually found the course useful in their practice.

A few gems like the TED talks below have helped me realize how useful physics is for innovation in general.  Take Elon Musk, the ultra-brilliant, probably from the future, braingasmic founder of Tesla Motors, PayPal, and SpaceX, who attributes his massive success as an entrepreneur to his study of physics. If the doctors of tomorrow are to take on the future’s advanced medical problems, we must be innovative investigators of the human machine.  While calculating the normal force of a block sliding down an inclined plane may not directly teach me how to care for and treat a human being, it did teach me to seek answers invisible to the naked eye.