Monday, April 04, 2011

Why is Math Important?

A student called and left me a voice mail and asked "why is there so much math in the program? Why is it important?" The student referenced the two courses, Technical Math, and Physics for the Allied Health Sciences. I suppose "so much" is a relative term, depending on your perspective. Personally I wouldn't consider two courses a huge amount, but if you hate math and physics, you might. Nonetheless, there really are some pretty functional reasons why they are included in the curriculum. Physical Therapists and Physical Therapist Assistants use math on daily level. When you work with patients, you are constanting thinking about and calculating weights, and forces. The patient is 25% weight bearing - how much weight can they place on that injured leg? We are reading and writing and dealing with units in the medical literature and in patient charts that are both in metric and standard values and need to convert them back and forth. We have a lardge body of scientific literature chock full of numbers and statistics that we have to be able to read and understand, and a passing knowledge of math is necessary for that. We administer drugs to patients via iontophoresis, and I certainly will not allow any student who can't do math to pass a skill with such important consequences unless they can demonstrate the knowledge underlying it. We create ratios, for example with sensory testing (15 out of 18 attempts today, 12 of 15 attempts at previous visit - so is the patient getting better or worse?). These are just a few examples of course, but it gives a sense of why we need math.