• Question: Do you need science to become a doctor?

    Asked by anon-256355 on 11 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Andrew Yool

      Andrew Yool answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      Working as a medical doctor requires many of the same skills as being a scientist. Medicine is based on an understanding of the human body that’s been built up using scientific methods (usually!), and you need to be able to understand technical information so that you can interpret the symptoms presented by patients. So, yes, if you want to be a doctor, you’ll need something of a science background. You might want to check in with individual university programmes to find out whether you need to study biology, chemistry and physics together, or whether some combination of them is OK. (Possibly someone here will work in one of these and be able to help directly.)

    • Photo: Martin Coath

      Martin Coath answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      Medicine is a scientific subject for sure, and most universities would require you to have some scientific qualifications before they accepted you for medical studies. In any case there is a lot of competition to get a place to study medicine at university, and a few science A levels are definitely going to help.

      But you don’t need to be an absolute whizz at physics or chemistry to be good at identifying diseases, thinking of treatments, caring for people, delivering babies, or taking out peoples tonsils.

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