Jealous me (medicine and math)

Had this visitor for a few days - my uncle's friend - he had come down to attend a conference on head and neck cancer. Super guy, extremely straightforward; landed in Schipol and straightaway got pickpocketed at WTC - as Ashwin says, always happens to the best seedha-est people. Shit. Rings true. But I am diverting.

Anyway, his passion for his profession brought it all back - the envy I have for my father, my uncles, Z - the satisfaction they have daily is to be never mine. Looking back, it was probably my love for math which led me to ditch medicine; shit if only medicine had math, I would have my cake and eaten it too.

Which brings me to the troubling question - why isn't math emphasized in the medical profession; ok thats not fair I dont know enough about the profession itself to comment thus; but then, why isn't math emphasized in the entrance exams; why are(were?) math and biology optionals for us; why aren't both compulsory; shouldn't the people who are working on our bodies and researching the human physiology etc be very mathematically - and by inference, logically - minded? Why aren't doctors first trained in logic and AI and then the brain? Maybe they would then have a different perspective on the neural network? My ignorance of medicine prevents me from citing instances in medicine where a sound mathematical backgound would be useful; but somehow I find it unpalatable that good math is indispensible in medicine.

(While on it, computers science students can fairly easily look at a human brain as some sort of computer, with a trained neural network and a scheduler which goes awry in intoxicated states! - btw, are humans multi-cpu-ed? do the sharper guys have faster cpus? is there a separate process for committing short term memory for long term memory which is why intoxicated people dont remember later what they did?! etc etc:) )

(I now need a doctor's perspective on a computer!)