Books for Shelf Exam

[wannaberad]

OK...I was wondering, from people who did well on shelf exams in 3rd year, what books did you use to (a) learn stuff from and (b) practice Qs. Just for starters, I'll ask about:

*Internal Medicine
*Surgery
*Pediatrics
*Obstetrics/Gynecology
*Psychiatry
*Family Medicine

Is Blueprints enough for reading, followed by questions? How about the First Aid for the Wards series? Should I bother attacking Cecil's Essentials of Medicine?
(I kinda feel like I'm shortchanging medicine by learning it from review books but I guess everything you really need to know you learn hands-on?)
Any advice is appreciated!

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[ckent]

For internal medicine, I'd recc reading my Internal medicine FAQ thread in the Internal medicine forum. Blueprints is a nice series, but it doesn't go into enough depth for most of the shelf exams. It does a nice job of covering the basics though, which is important for your rotation and your shelf questions. I've found that pre-test was the best book for questions. NMS is too difficult to read cover to cover.

 

[jldavis]

There is no one great book for any shelf exam. What one student says is great another will tell you is not good. So, here is what I did. Blue prints as a whole was a great series to start your studying with. Then move on to a Q&A book. I preferred Appleton and Lange. I also used Pre-test. For Family, I recommend NMS!! Very good. For surgery, you really should read Recall. As far as medicine goes, I have heard that First Aid for medicine is good. I'm selling a bunch of book in the free classified section if you want to save a couple of bucks. Good luck to you.

 

[vitaminj]

My school includes in our tuition a "Kaplan Fee" so I felt that if I was already paying for this stuff I might as well give it a try. In general pretty solid stuff...I watched many of the tapes and took notes in the provided books and found this more than adequate to do well on all of the shelf exams. I would recommend staying away from the Surgery tapes if you try this...fairly useless...Surgery Recall is probably the best there.

As with all things this is just one man's opinion so take it with a grain of salt. 😀