Behavioral Science BRS

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When people say FA doesn't have enough behavioral science and to supplement with BRS, is this mostly for the ethical stuff or for everything? BRS has a lot of psych stuff so I'm wondering if people use BRS for that stuff as well (FA seems to be pretty solid for psych, but i dunno for sure)

Originally Posted by Aclamity

When people say FA doesn't have enough behavioral science and to supplement with BRS, is this mostly for the ethical stuff or for everything? BRS has a lot of psych stuff so I'm wondering if people use BRS for that stuff as well (FA seems to be pretty solid for psych, but i dunno for sure)

I've read FA and am just about finished with USMLE Rx, but my psych, behavioral and biostats need tweaking (as these are/were my weaker areas in Rx), so after I finish the QBank, I'm going to spend a solid week just reading BRS Behavioral and HY Biostats. FA is definitely not enough in these areas.

I've already looked through bits and pieces of the BRS, and I can tell that some of the stuff is obviously low yield, so my focus will be to merely skim most of it and, at the least, just answer the 500 questions that are in it. The same will go for HY Biostats; there are definitely some LY areas which will just be skimmed, but the HY sections and the 78 questions will get done.

The bottom line is that we've already heard/read from lots of people on SDN (or wherever) that, in the end, FA and UWorld are "all we need to know." Maybe that's true in the sense that much of the info in other resources ultimately converges on those two, but if you're like me, who has BS and BS as weaker areas, it wouldn't hurt to spend additional time topping up with BRS behavioral and HY Biostats. I've seriously thought about the potential utility of these two books, and I reasoned that it just can't hurt to go through them.

Based on the 10 released NBMEs, the biostats questions that they like to ask are pretty well covered by First Aid/UWorld. I mean you do see some weird questions, but those happen with every subject. I'd think if you know First Aid cold you should be pretty confident in most things that they can throw at you.

I think First Aid psych is more than enough. Psych is one of the most straight forward of the "behavioral sciences" type questions that you can get. I'd consider myself lucky if all of my questions were from that category. There are a few diagnoses that aren't in First Aid that I have seen on NBME questions, such as female hypoactive sexual desire disorder, but in general psych diagnoses have pretty self explanatory titles.

Behavioral sciences proper is just a crap shoot. I'm going to also try to learn as much as I can from BRS. I mean the NBME in the past has asked questions ranging from what type of health insurance has the lowest out of pocket costs (making you pick between HMO, PPO, HSA, point of service, fee-for-service) to abortions. There are certain rules you can use when answering the "quote" questions, but sometimes it doesn't quite fit the paradigm.

Originally Posted by ijn

Behavioral sciences proper is just a crap shoot. I'm going to also try to learn as much as I can from BRS. I mean the NBME in the past has asked questions ranging from what type of health insurance has the lowest out of pocket costs (making you pick between HMO, PPO, HSA, point of service, fee-for-service) to abortions. There are certain rules you can use when answering the "quote" questions, but sometimes it doesn't quite fit the paradigm.

That's the behavioral science-equivalent of anatomical insertions/origins in terms of low-yield. However unlike some of the anatomy questions, I think any of us would feel shameful if we couldn't answer an insurance question, particularly since we're all going into the field.

Haha, yeah. The sad thing is that over the last two years my school hasn't dedicated a single minute of lecture or small group to talking about the different kinds of health insurance that our patients may have or what the different plans mean. I'd bet 75% of the kids in my class are still on their parent's insurance and couldn't even tell you what kind of plan they're personally on, let alone be able to articulate differences between the common options. Although we did get a few lectures from our state medical association on why Obamacare is the devil. I guess that counts.

I had a lot of trouble looking up the answer to that one. I think HMOs have the lowest out of pocket, but I still don't know if that was correct.

Originally Posted by ijn

Haha, yeah. The sad thing is that over the last two years my school hasn't dedicated a single minute of lecture or small group to talking about the different kinds of health insurance that our patients may have or what the different plans mean. I'd bet 75% of the kids in my class are still on their parent's insurance and couldn't even tell you what kind of plan they're personally on, let alone be able to articulate differences between the common options. Although we did get a few lectures from our state medical association on why Obamacare is the devil. I guess that counts.

I had a lot of trouble looking up the answer to that one. I think HMOs have the lowest out of pocket, but I still don't know if that was correct.

The one good thing about studying for the USMLE is that it proves to us that we're capable of learning details about pretty much anything if we just put the time forth. We might not know about health insurance, but at least we're ignorant because we're apathetic, not because of ineptitude.

My HMO has $5 oop cost for every drug and procedure. The guy with a physician dad has a $0 oop cost.