Board Vitals x 2 and additional x1 incorrect; 1/2 of Huntoon, 1/2 of Pass Machine QBank and reviewed that Syllabus, 2/3rds of Pain Medicine Secrets book, and 1/3 of some dusty other book that no one reads and wasn't helpful either. I'm not sure any of this helped. Of all those, I think PassMachne and Huntoon may have been the most helpful if I was able to finish them and didn't concentrate as much on Board Vitals. As I'm sure you're asking, I did this and gave up two months of life to do nothing but study for this and exam as I'm not a traditional candidate and have never been good at exam. I am fairly certain I failed.
It's challenging to respect a board and exam where a majority of the questions can NOT be pulled from common study materials and the margin for pass/fail based on questions like acupuncture physio, PT, diversity practices, updated breast feeding guidelines, neonatal spinal cords, procedures that haven't been performed in any academic setting for the last twenty years, and third tier symptoms of otherwise common diseases. All this when nurse practitioners are doing epidural steroids and untrained private docs inserting pumps- is this how we choose to advance, promote, and recognize fellowship trained colleagues tasked with alleviating human suffering? If/when I fail this I'll share my notes for anyone who'd like to DM me.
I plan on paying the additional 2K for the fake American Board of Pain Medicine exam so I can take that in the spring and continue to try to build a practice in my state to get on insurance panels (the only reason seemingly to take any exam) despite being fellowship trained. The deadline for the is conveniently October 15th so will take a couple days to process and just pay that money.
