[jameskilton]

Article has been hugged so commenting more along the comments here.

Pharmacy school teaches Calculus. Why would that be? Do you need to run derivatives and integrals to fill prescriptions?

No. Teaching maths, particularly calculus, teaches people how to 1) not make mistakes and 2) catch your own mistakes quickly. Vitally important skills for someone filling out live-saving medicine.

[jacobolus]

The point of learning mathematics is not to "not make mistakes". More strongly: the misconception that mathematics or mathematics education is about getting "right answers" as quickly and accurately as possible is a disaster for learning.

A calculus class should ideally be making someone think much harder than that. Calculus is about understanding the relationships involved with continuous quantities and modeling the way things move and change. It is a basic prerequisite for understanding biochemistry and statistics, essential background for understanding pharmaceuticals.

[tptacek]

I'm pretty sure this is a retcon. There are subject-matter-specific reasons PharmD's learn calculus. They don't use it day-to-day, but lots of STEM curricula (a) don't make sense without calculus and (b) don't lead to jobs where you're integrating by parts every day.

[sn9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_under_the_curve_(pharmaco...

[9rx]

> Teaching maths, particularly calculus, teaches people how to 1) not make mistakes and 2) catch your own mistakes quickly. Vitally important skills for someone filling out live-saving medicine.

Learning calculus achieves the same effect, though. It is not the teaching that is important (although some may find it useful).

[pharrington]

You literally need calculus to understand dosage response curves.

[aoki]

Fortunately, medical researchers discovered Tai’s Formula for the area under a piecewise linear function. No calculus required! :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tai%27s_model

[pharrington]

lmfao yeah I heard about this!

[Telemakhos]

> Article has been hugged

Article archive: https://archive.is/2AdUJ

It's very short.