Physics in Medicine and Medical Education

Over the last few years, I’ve been contributing to a group called Physics in Medicine. It focuses on how physics contributes to, and indeed is essential to, the practice of medicine. The team consists of both physicists and medical doctors collaborating to demonstrate how physics can be better taught to medical students. My interactions with this team influenced the preparation of the sixth edition of Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology (which you can now find listed at Amazon with a projected publication date of October of this year).

Physics in Medicine and Medical Education.

Recently, we published a proceedings titled Physics in Medicine and Medical Education. You can purchase a hard copy of this book on Amazon, or view it for free as a flip-book. Here is the table of contents.

My role was to lead the effort on the chapter “The Integrated Cardiovascular-Pulmonary System: The Underlying Principles That Make It Work.” When working on it, I often used the shorthand title “Physics of the Heart.” The abstract states 

The Physics in Medicine program is an attempt to improve medical education in a way consistent with the AAMC-HHMI 2009 report on the Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians. Our aim is to illustrate how the findings of this report can be applied to the cardiovascular system. We do this by examining one specific case study of an elderly man with shortness of breath, and review the physics required in his diagnosis and treatment.

The amount of physics in the medical treatment of cardiovascular disease is astounding. One of the figures from our chapter illustrates this. Many topics in physics—fluid mechanics, acoustics, optics, electricity and magnetism, and nuclear physics—play a role in the treatment of just one disorder (patent foramen ovale, or an opening between the left and right atria). 

The editor of our Proceedings, Ed Szuszczewicz, is the visionary that leads Physics in Medicine. Ed is a plasma physicist who was asked by his department chairman to teach a physics-for-premeds class. That got him hooked. If you just read his Preface and Epilogue in Physics in Medicine and Medical Education you’ll get the gist of our effort. 

In Chapter 4 of the Proceedings, one of my coauthors, Nancy Donaldson, describes her experience directing a Physics of Medicine undergraduate major at Rockhurst University in Kansas City. Nancy is a passionate advocate for active learning and describes several of the modules used in her classes. It kind of makes me want to retake my physics major. I especially like her analysis of the lungs, a topic that doesn’t get as much attention as it should have in IPMB. Nancy is also one of the founders the Living Physics Portal, where you can find high-quality materials for teaching physics to life science students at the college level. The other two coauthors on my chapter, Chad Miller and Andrew Olson, are MDs who helped keep the story focused on medicine. I have a tendency to stress the physics too much, and they helped counterbalance that.

Another contributor to Physics in Medicine and Medical Education was the late Joe Redish. He was a central figure in our effort until he passed away at age of 82 in 2024. I made sure to cite his helpful “Using Math in Physics” articles published in The Physics Teacher, and I featured his wonderful “warp and weft” figure connecting subareas of physics to learning techniques in our Physics of the Heart chapter. I miss Joe. 

I hope you enjoy Physics in Medicine and Medical Education. Instructors who are teaching from Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology might want to take a look at it, to get an idea about the physics needed in modern medicine.