Re: Teaching physics to biology students

jmfbahciv@xxxxxxx wrote:

<snip>

This is probably where the problem lies. Let me try to explain.
A wannabe medico is going to immediately decide, after reading
the above paragraph, that none of that applies to the medical
field and will write off retaining any knowledge in the class.
Your paragraph talked about knowledge needed to manufacture equipment. This almost ignores any application of that equipment (how it should be used and how it should not be
used).

I don't have any data to back this up, but I would guess that a major deficiency in hospital care (excepting trauma) is that the MD must rely on patient self-reporting in order to figure out what is wrong. That, coupled with the current poor quality of diagnostic equipment (poor, when compared to say, the ability to measure physical properties to many decimal points) forces docs to require skills other than quantitative thinking.

In physics terms, medical measurements are very 'coarse-grained'. Think about blood pressure measurements, and what is really being probed. And trying to determine a cellular basis for (for example) a particular hypertensive b.p. reading- a reading that may have 10% variability during an exam, and another 10% daily variation, when in reality, actual blood concentration of sodium (which is what drives blood pressure) is tightly controlled- less than 1%, probably around 0.1%. Biological systems seem to work on logarithmic scales, not linear- it can be difficult to 'convert' between the two.. at least it is for me.

If you want to make best friends with a doc, offer to come up with a way of allowing him to see inside a body (without cutting it open), in real time, at arbitrary locations and at arbitrary length scales.

<snip>

I've been having great guilt pangs because I said that I was going to leave the work to you and Andy.

Eh, go on... that's what 'division of labor' is all about.


In between expending my brain power trying to figure out how to
do my state tax forms, I've been trying to think of a lab
that would have the student use physics in setting up a feeding
tube. So far, I've failed because I don't seem to be able to
break out of my mold-y thinking about the labs I did as a student.

Every lab was supposed to make calculate something. I don't know
if this is the goal of a physics lab. I suppose one could have the kid calculate the rate of flow. That seemed to be
something nurses and doctors couldn't do when delivering chemo
intraveneously.

To pick on your example, part of it is that AFAIK, nobody really knows what the correct rate of flow 'should' be- too much patient-to-patient variation.


--
Andrew Resnick, Ph.D.
Department of Physiology and Biophysics
Case Western Reserve University
.

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