5MCC + others for PDA

[secretwave101]

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Wondering if 5MCC functions as a medical reference, or if most people also have Harrison's on their PDA's.

Also, is Washington Manual equiv. to Harrison's, or is it different?

Oh, and where does Merck Manual fit into all of this?

 

[buddindoc]

when i did my internal medicine and icu rotation 5mcc was indispensable i did never have the harrisons or the merck manual .washinton manual is ok not great. ferri guide is the next best thing

 

[BADunning]

I find myself using 5MinCC on a regular basis, and I do find it more useful than Harrison's Handbook or the Washington Manual. I have all three on my PDA.

I'll second the opinion on Ferri's. I have it in a spiral bound paper edition and find it useful also.

 

[GO_MEDPEDS]

In general, I find the 5MCC to be very useful for quick reference and for devising a plan for diagnosis and treatment, but it is not a definitive reference. Harrison's, though complete, is extremely difficult to "scan," and so I generally avoid it unless I have a topic that is difficult to find elsewhere (which there are very few). I find Outlines in Clinical Medicine to be a very definitive text with tons of information that is much more readily searched and scanned than Harrison's. It is available for the PDA and probably worth purchasing. I would recommend Ferri's Guide to the Clinical Patient (paperback or PDA) over the Washington Manual because it includes a section on differential diagnosis, many of the labs, and just seems more likely to have the information for which I'm looking.

The Merck Manual (text or PDA) is also a much more readily scanned and searched "step-down" Harrison's. Though less complete, the Merck Manual will often have some more details that may not appear in the 5MCC or Outlines in Clinical Medicine.

My recommendations on PDA reference sofware to own:
5-Minute Clinical Consult, Outlines in Clinical Medicine, Ferri's Guide, and Taber's (or Stedman's) from Skyscape
Merck Manual from HandHeldMed


Grant🙂

 

[secretwave101]

I have so far decided upon 5MCC and then I picked up Steadmans, both from Skyscape. One of the reasons I did this was because I thought I would be able to "toggle" b/t the two programs. I was hoping to click or highlight a word in 5MCC and then call up Steadman's to get a definition for it.

As it appears, the two don't really interface well. You can call up Steadman's, but you have to grafitti in the word you're looking for from scratch. It's a pretty inefficient process. Too bad. Many programs OTHER than 5MCC let you highlight and copy words to be used in a dictionary etc.

Anyone else find this problem, or am I doing something wrong?

 

[Scott_L]

It worked for me, I highlighted a word, tapped link and selected Stedman's. I do have the Stedman's Concise.

-Scott

 

[secretwave101]

Basically, my 5MCC won't let me highlight ANYTHING.

Is that normal? Should I delete it and re-load or something? It would be a huge help to be able to highlight words and flip over to a dictionary, or throw it into notes or whatever.

 

[GO_MEDPEDS]

I think there may be some confusion here to what "highlighting" means. Secretwave101, by highlighting, do you mean that you are attempting to select words within the body of the text... i.e. you have already "highlighted" and chosen a topic to look up in 5MCC and you are now trying to look up a specific word in the text in Stedman's? If that is what you've been attempting, you are correct, you cannot highlight specific words within the text and cross-reference them with Stedman's. There are some dictionaries that will do this (not Skyscape), but there hasn't been anything developed (as far as I know) that will let you do this to date.

If this is not what you mean by highlighting, please let me know...


Grant😕

 

[secretwave101]

Yep, that's exactly what I mean.

But Steadman's is not really a problem, because anything that remotely qualifies as a term is already a link so I can see what it means.

The other direction is the problem. I'd like to highlight terms (especially DD diseases) so that I can copy them into a notepad or search for them in Steadmans w/o re-typing them. Often, the disease is something I've never heard of, and re-typing it in graffiti is slow and unhelpful.

For example, today I looked up the DD for appendicitis. 5MCC said that 75% of erroneoneus dx of append's are due to acute mesenteric lymphadenitis. I have no idea what that is, but there's no way I'm going to be able to graffiti that into my Steadmans (or even back into the search of 5MCC) in-between patients on the ward. By the time I'm done spelling the name right, the patient will be in surgery.

In some programs (some of the less proprietary ones), you can just tap any word, and it becomes "highlighted". You can then copy it, or double-click it and it'll become a search term in a dictionary.

I'm starting to think that Skyscape is too into cash to really be helpful.

 

[secretwave101]

I just got an email message back from Skyscape support. They said their licensing agreements with the companies that they get their medical info from won't allow users to copy text from their programs to be used in other programs (even other Skyscape programs, it appears).

I understand that people need to protect their work (like a textbook) from illicit copying. But this is just a simple functionality. And how can someone copyright individual words that everyone uses, like appendicitis, anyway? That seems pretty stupid to me. Hopefully, the lawyers who thought up those rules will someday be forced to wait for surgery for their acute appendicitis while everyone grafittis in the individual letters to each differential diagnosis before they decide on treatment.

I told Skyscape I was pretty unhappy with their product. Given that I'm out 100 bucks (5MCC + Steadman's), I guess I'll have to deal with it.

The standing criticism of the US health care system by the rest of the world is that it focuses too much on money. This, to me, is pretty good evidence to support that assertion.