Pre-health students may not know what physics <i>is</i>.

Unlike in introductory chemistry or biology courses, pre-health students in introductory physics courses often don't know the premise or purpose of the discipline. Popular stories about, e.g., black holes and quantum computing don't provide a route for lay observers to understand how these topics share fundamental rules about forces and energies, expressed mathematically. About half of U.S. high schools don't offer physics courses, and many that do exist teach a qualitative version of the subject rather teaching than the process of physical abstraction. As high-resource universities and physics departments continue the necessary work of diversifying their student bodies, it is important for us to recognize this divide, potentially new to our classrooms, and learn to teach to it. The traditional approach of diving into mathematically-motivated formalism at the beginning of the course will often leave the least-prepared students, who are most important to reach, bewildered and alienated. This talk discusses my experience and possible insights from reforming a traditional pre-health physics course, to teach the conceptual core of physics to students completely inexperienced with physics. For example, explicitly addressing questions such as "what is an equation in physics, and what is it for?", and initially prioritizing form equally with content in student work, have been helpful measures.