| Latina_Rica, as a clinical psychiatrist, I'd be very surprised if you'd have to involve Calculus in your day-to-day work, it's generally of little or no application to patient care. In terms of Chemistry, you'd need to know it in a very practical way; where you would spend much of your time involved in clinical psychopharmacology inasmuch as treating patients with the appropriate medications and knowing exactly how a given medication works/interacts with other medications. This is not to say that you'd be employing first principles of college-level chemistry to your work, but rather that since pharmacology is in large part based on chemistry/molecular biology, you'd need some facility with such things, but again only in very practical applications... certainly nothing like when learning fundamental Inorganic or Organic Chemistry.
In terms of whether you'd be okay as a Psychiatrist, this is more a matter of your interest in this field and whether you will enjoy this type of patient population. Until you rotate through Psychiatry in Med School, it's hard to say if you will like it or not since it's probably quite different than what you imagine. Psychiatrists are highly skilled physicians who are well-read in the latest treatments for their patients, and who are guided by their clinical experience. In the US, psychoanalysis is not employed by many psychiatrists as they are very time-limited, such that they carefully manage medications and side effects and often defer adjunctive CBT or psychoanaysis to clinical psychologists. Patients are abundant and range drastically in the degree of their symptomatology.
In short, I wouldn't worry so much about your distaste for chemistry and calculus as it pertains to psychiatry. In terms of whether you'd be okay at it, it really depends on how you feel when you rotate through psychiatry in the third year of med school (in the US, I'm referring to).
I wish you well, love.  | 
03-14-2008, 08:42 AM
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