You are speaking from a place of ignorance. The prerequisites needed to take the courses that you mention alone are >1 year, yet alone all of the material needed to become a doctor. Where I went to Uni, you didn't take biochem until you were a senior. The reason for this is because before you take biochem you need General Chemistry 1 & 2, Organic Chemistry 1 & 2, and some smattering of Biology. You have to take these courses sequentially, they build on each other. If you don't know what a nucleophile is then you simply can't pass biochem, and that's how it should be.

Granted, you could theoretically shorten the program by removing all the humanities courses; but shouldn't doctors-to-be take ethics courses?

> You are speaking from a place of ignorance

You're right, I hold my hands up. I don't have any medical training.

> Where I went to Uni, you didn't take biochem until you were a senior. The reason for this is because before you take biochem you need General Chemistry 1 & 2, Organic Chemistry 1 & 2, and some smattering of Biology. You have to take these courses sequentially, they build on each other.

You obviously know what you're talking about and I won't debate you on how this works. But again, does a prospective doctor need to spend 4 years on this? How does every country other than the US and Canada manage to train their doctors without making them get a Bachelor's along the way in something non-medical? Why can't doctors study 5 or 6 years and graduate with a medical degree, ready to become a general practitioner? That's how they do it in the UK. Are you saying their docs didn't pass biochem or don't know what a nucleophile is?

> shouldn't doctors-to-be take ethics courses?

Pretty sure med students have time to take ethics courses if they do a 5/6 year medical degree.

My apologies, I didn't mean to come off harshly, it's approx 3 am here so I'm not exactly a ball of sunshine.

Do doc's need to spend 4 years doing an undergrad before med school? Maybe. There are a lot of things that you need to learn before you can learn what you need to be a doctor. Do you need to know physics? Eh, only kind of.

I'm not terribly familiar with the system in the UK, but at least where I went to school, most of the folks who were planning on going to med school studied either Chem, Biochem or straight Biology. In fact, it was something of an issue because the Chemistry courses tended to be weed out courses, i.e. you had to pass Organic chem 1 & 2 with a (3.0+)/4.0, or you didn't have a ghost of a chance of getting in to med school. I, personally, didn't know anyone who was planning on going to med school who was studying anything outside the STEM umbrella.

>Pretty sure med students have time to take ethics courses if they do a 5/6 year medical degree. Reasonably. I was really only picking on this point because of, what I had thought was, a dismissal to the usage of the humanities as a doc.

If it's anything like CS there's maybe a couple of semesters of applicable material and a bunch of filler to extract money for the university.

Good news! It's not anything like CS.

Things you need to learn, not an inclusive list, before med school: Chemistry, drug interactions, A&P, Ethics, Statistics, Maths, and Biology.

That's (6, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4) 18 courses minimum. Remembering that they have to be done sequentially rather than concurrently and you're looking at, bare minimum, 2 years rather than 2 semesters.

This is as it should be. To bring it back to your CS example, if you are making a web app and you fail to secure your attack surface, the worst that happens is that folks get their info stolen. If you fail to do your drug interaction math correctly, people die.