So there are numerous posts regarding how great the step-up books are, but most of the posts are several years old. I was wondering if anyone can speak to their usefulness in 2011/2012 considering they were copyrighted in 2007 and 2008. Are they outdated now? Are there better sources for the IM shelf and step 2 prep? Thanks!
So, I've posted on this topic a couple of times (though I can't find them to copy and paste, so no worries about asking a common question).
Basically, the thing about medicine is that (1) its VERY slow to change, (2) classic is classic.
For a medical student, you learn how things work (first year). Then you learn how things break (second year). Third year is about how patients present. Identifying symptoms as syndromes, syndromes as diagnoses. To do that, you have to learn the
classic or the
common presentation. You couldn't possibly learn medicine by learning the exceptions without first learning the typical. And so, it is no surprise, that shelves and step 2 test the typical patterns of disease. The presentation of pneumonia is still fever and a cough, just as it was 40 years ago. A crushing substernal chest pain radiating down the arm and up the jaw is still a heart attack. There aren't mysteries on the tests. Classic presentations haven't changed. And so, the knowledge has changed either.
Classic is Classic.
What does change is treatment options. 15 years ago there was Imatinib for CML. Their wasn't dabigatran for Afib anticoagulation. Yet, MONABASH has been the standard for a heart attack, and heparin for a pulmonary embolism. While the New England journal article coming out on August 4th says decreased mortality with CT scan screening for Lung Cancer in Smokers, a medical student is supposed to know "smoking leads to lung cancer." And so, for the most part, classic is classic, and typical interventions / typical diagnostics haven't changed for typical presentations.
Medicine is slow to change.
SO: the information you see in books that are 5 years old are still pretty legit.
And here's the bonus. If you use a resource, and it gets you 50 questions you otherwise wouldn't have gotten, BUT it contains false information that causes you to miss 2 questions, you're still up 48 questions. Worse, you would have to had (1) actually learned the wrong information, (2) recalled that information on the test, (3) chose the wrong option because of the recalled information. The likelihood of all three being pretty low.
Bottom line: you got a good resource? use it.
