Best physical exam books

[Jabbed]

Choose your favorite!

Bates and Mosby fans need not apply.

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[Psai]

What is a book? I use ucsd's website

 

[HLxDrummer]

Evidence based. Half the exam stuff we learn is pointless.

 

[MedWonk]

What is a book? I use ucsd's website

This. Officially, we use Bates 10th edition as the primary source, but in reality I think we all just read the UCSD website and use Bates as reference.

 

[TooMuchResearch]

Evidence based. Half the exam stuff we learn is pointless.

Only half?

But really, much of the physical exam serves the purpose of giving the patient the full doctoring experience.

 

[metopic]

IDK but I feel like there is no book good enough if you rotate with an attending that trained in a "british" med school system (like all the indian IM attendings). Their physical exam knowledge is incredibly extensive, and tedious. I'm fairly certain it's impossible to impress an Indian IM person with your PE skills. They look at me like I'm ******ed and I'm pretty upper quartile.

I gave up, I use the UCSD website and take my whippings. Not wasting more brain power on that than I already have. God invented CT scanners for a reason.

 

[NickNaylor]

Choose your favorite!

Bates and Mosby fans need not apply.

Amazon product
Amazon product
Amazon product
Amazon product

Bates.

If you want a book that's very evidence-based, I'd recommend Symptom to Diagnosis. Disclosure: this text was written by a few professors at my institution. It's a pretty dry read, but it does include sensitivity/specificity, LRs, etc. for common physical exam findings for certain problems. It's not the kind of book you would sit through and read unless you're into killing yourself, but as a reference text it's pretty solid.

 

[Psai]

Nah, it's the super old american internal medicine docs that are the exam wizards. The ones that probably should have retired by now but this is literally their life. The ones who will just stare at someone's hands for what seems like five minutes before they even move on from the inspection phase to the palpation phase. There were two at my med school that make you feel like old school internal medicine is the only thing worth doing in life.

Nowadays, the medicine docs just listen to someone's hearts and lungs, maybe feel their legs and somehow rounds are still 4 hours long.

 

[operaman]

I'll add another: forget the title and I'm away from home at the moment, but it's basically a compilation of JAMA's Rational Clinical Exam series. Not very good for learning initially, but I've found it very helpful in refining as I go along. They've done a really nice job giving you some real data behind different maneuvers, and while some perform very poorly, others turn out to be very powerful and they weren't always the ones I thought. Definitely worth a read.

 

[RabidSurgeon]

Barbara Bates and Macleod (a British textbook) are still my go-to books after graduating, and they have never let me down.

 

[Mad Jack]

I like Bates, personally. Then again, I'm kind of a masochist in regard to learning things in the most tedious way possible.

 

[Slack3r]

Nowadays, the medicine docs just listen to someone's hearts and lungs, maybe feel their legs and somehow rounds are still 4 hours long.

The best is when they "auscultate" through a hospital gown and 2 layers of blankets. Meanwhile, we were publicly flogged if we tried to listen through a T shirt in our physical diagnosis course.

 

[Jabbed]

The best is when they "auscultate" through a hospital gown and 2 layers of blankets. Meanwhile, we were publicly flogged if we tried to listen through a T shirt in our physical diagnosis course.

How are you ever going to hear the mystical 3rd and 4th heart sounds through a t shirt?!