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Originally Posted by johndoe3344
Do you think that MOST murmur questions to be encountered on the real thing can be deduced from the question stem without listening to the murmur? I've noticed that I was able to deduce most of them in Rx but not in UW (I think I'm currently 0/4 for those).
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DIT says that you'll be able to figure them all out with fair certainty from the stem.
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If not, how long would you guys think it would take to learn to be able to hear the murmurs?My exam is in 3.5 weeks, and I'm not sure I want to commit many days to learn them as I'm absolutely horrible at them, and I cannot distinguish between murmurs for the life of me. They all sound the same to me.
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You can get audio clips of heart sounds fairly easily. If you spend a couple of hours listening to them, that should help you out. For Step 1, you only need to recognize a couple of things:
1. Which period is systole and which period is diastole (systole is the shorter period, diastole is the longer period)... I'm assuming that you'll be able to hear the two beats that separate the two periods.
2. What a murmur sounds like (hint: "woosh" or "poof").
3. What a click sounds like (although this one is less important).
With those two pieces of knowledge, you should be able to figure out whether a murmur is systolic or diastolic. That's the only piece of information that you'll need to extract from the heart sounds.
When you know whether the murmur is systolic or diastolic, you can figure out what it is based on its location. This point is all about reasoning your way through the anatomy/physiology of the heart and really doesn't have anything to do with your auscultation skills. First Aid 2012 has a nice little one-page high-yield summary in the cardiac physiology section.