Medicine

[dynamicequilibrium]

What are my chances to study medicine if I don't do biology in A-levels?
I am currently Year 11 and will be doing Physics, Chemistry, Maths, Further Maths in A-levels. Thank you very much.

If you go to www.medschools.ac.uk, it will list the entry requirements for every British medical school course. When I was a medical student, (long ago, when dinosaurs roamed etc...!) biology wasn’t a necessary subject, and they often preferred a physics/maths/chemistry combo. But I’m now retired, so you need to check the current set up.

Thank you very much.

I am a vet not a medic, but a lot of the preclinical curriculum is very similar. Whilst biology is not always an entry requirement, I would think about the course content. Preclinical curriculum is very biology based, surgery and medicine is very biology based. Just make sure the course is what you expect it to be.

You definitely need chemistry but not necessarily biology. Some medical schools specify that biology is a requirement and some that you need chemistry and one other science (which includes maths). They are all very clear on their websites so worh checking it out beforehand if you might have your heart set on going to a certain medical school.

I'm a GP, qualified from med school in the early 2000's. There were a handful in my year without biology - they got through, but struggled in the pre-clinical. one of the biochem lecturers made it very clear that they wouldn't have been admitted if it was up to him and was quite unpleasant to them (he was a bit of a git all round, has to be said).

The issue was that my A-level course had a lot of human biology, so, for example, we'd spent a term on the human heart. All that background was covered in the first 15 minutes of the first lecture - so it wasn't that no-one told it to us, it was that it's a steep learning curve if you haven't done it already.

If you're set on medicine, then I'd drop physics or further maths in favour of biology.