Biochemistry's importance in medicine

[Andria]

Biochemistry is the chemistry of living things. More precisely, the chemistry of living cells. Living cells are really nothing more than an isolated aqueous environment where a series of chemical reactions occur.

The reason biochemistry is important in terms of medicine is because, for example, many drugs exert their influence by altering cell chemistry, or biochemistry. Thus, it is important to understand biochemistry in order to understand how many drugs function.

In addition, many diseases, such as cancer, can be described in terms of biochemical changes in the cell that lead to changes in gene expression and cell physiology. Thus, if you can determine the biochemical changes that led to some disease state, perhaps you can design drugs to targe those changes, and return cells to a "normal" state (in other words, reverse the disease state and restore health).

[Lovejones07]

i love biochemstry. It is hard to visualise as a system because the way we make it easier for ourselves to remember (pathways etc) dont to justice to the full on web/network system of biochemistry

[dsn]

I'm sure there was a thread like this some time ago.

Biochemistry is taught quite badly at Birmingham in my opinion. There isn't much teaching and all the teaching of metabolism is split up among three modules, so you end up scratching your head trying to work out how the pathways inter-relate.

Obviously biochemistry is important in medicine, but it's not really a medical science, as most research is done in biosciences departments and on bacteria, I think. If you feel absolutely captivated by biochemistry, perhaps you should do that as a degree instead of medicine. Of course there's no reason why you can't have an interest in it as a medical student and indeed biochemistry is very important in pathology labs - although most people there are scientists or MLAs under the over all charge of a haematology consultant, I believe. Probably I'm very mistaken.