-
CycleTrack and SDN are teaming up to make medical school admissions more transparent and accessible! Read the announcement to learn how we’re supporting the future of CycleTrack’s free application-tracking tools .
Step I first aid or medessentials?
Started by goodies
Get help with your application
Use all the free resources available to you from SDN: articles, guides, expert advising, forums discussions, and school research.
Couldn't find Medessentials as a book at either kaplan.com or amazon.com, kindly post a link, from where one can buy it online or read a review about it.
Thanks
Thanks for the link, goodies.
But it is not a book, but a software with a book, which cannot be downloaded.I think its a tad expensive.Nothing beats TOTAL ownership of the book or software that one buys.I am sure medsessentials is a great product, but cannot be downloaded in its FULL form.And once the subscription expires, its all over.
Nothing beats the First Aid, as a book.And I scaned the sucker,have it on my laptop.Pity can't get it on my Palm.🙁
But it is not a book, but a software with a book, which cannot be downloaded.I think its a tad expensive.Nothing beats TOTAL ownership of the book or software that one buys.I am sure medsessentials is a great product, but cannot be downloaded in its FULL form.And once the subscription expires, its all over.
Nothing beats the First Aid, as a book.And I scaned the sucker,have it on my laptop.Pity can't get it on my Palm.🙁
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
I have the actual book. I guess it's too new right now, but I'm sure you will hear a lot about it in the upcoming months.
Whatever you end up doing. I think you're cheating yourself if you don't use FA. Is is perfect? No. Do the authors have a pretty solid idea of what's on the test? Yes.
I plan on using first aid the week before the test to keep the really high yield stuff in my head. I'm using med essentials w/ my coursework and annotating it to use for board review.
Medessentials the book is inferior to First Aid, I think mostly because First Aid has been through many editions and has benefited from student feedback. It does have a few good sections (fantastic coverage of parasites) but many sections are downright awful. It has a LOT of tables stuffed with information, which are nice as a reference but not nearly as memorizable as the First Aid quick-association style layout. In fact some chapters are basically entirely tables. Conspicuously missing from ME are the helpful mnemonics and associations from FA (Arygyll Robertson-Prostitute Pupil, Accomadation but No Reaction). Generally ME has little or no space for you to make notes... and while often there are more details than FA, ME is by NO means complete and it DOES need annotating! Besides, just reading is not going to help you remember things-over and over, older students have told me that it's not reading FA that's valuable, it's annotating FA that put their scores over the top.
One thing that is nice about ME is that there are some black and white photos of important things in the margins, unlike FA where you have to keep flipping to the picture section.
I didn't really use the online part of it, mostly because it is system based, and my medical school isn't so it was really not that useful. The review questions are pretty simplistic and not at all what I would expect from Kaplan after checking out Qbank. There wasn't any extra information online that wasn't in the book.
I don't know what the price of Medessentials is (I got a free 'evaluation' copy as a former MCAT instructor) but I know how Kaplan prices their stuff and I'm betting that it's not worth it. I'm sticking with FA and and the BRS duo. I may cut out some of the tiny margin pictures from ME and paste them into my FA.
One thing that is nice about ME is that there are some black and white photos of important things in the margins, unlike FA where you have to keep flipping to the picture section.
I didn't really use the online part of it, mostly because it is system based, and my medical school isn't so it was really not that useful. The review questions are pretty simplistic and not at all what I would expect from Kaplan after checking out Qbank. There wasn't any extra information online that wasn't in the book.
I don't know what the price of Medessentials is (I got a free 'evaluation' copy as a former MCAT instructor) but I know how Kaplan prices their stuff and I'm betting that it's not worth it. I'm sticking with FA and and the BRS duo. I may cut out some of the tiny margin pictures from ME and paste them into my FA.
I know this thread is quite old, but didn't want to start a new one.
Was wondering if peoples thoughts about medEssentials has changed recently? I have the 2nd edition. I feel like I am doing myself a disservice by not using FA though, especially based on general opinion about Kaplan on these forums.
Was wondering if peoples thoughts about medEssentials has changed recently? I have the 2nd edition. I feel like I am doing myself a disservice by not using FA though, especially based on general opinion about Kaplan on these forums.
What is the general opinion of Kaplan on this forum? I thought Kaplan was pretty good for everything besides Path and of course that is Goljan.
although i purchased both texts, I used medessentials foremost, thinking that since it had more fancy diagrams etc in it it would be better.
i learned all sorts of things.... too bad they weren't on my usmle.
afterwards, talking with friends i found myself saying, "gee, i didn't know this xyz..." and my friends would respond, "oh, that was right out of FA"
🙁 i thought i knew enough trivia, esp FA trivia since I did usmleRx and scored somewhere around (75-80%) on it...
anyhow, even though I read RR path 3x, BRS physio, HY neuro, Neuroanatomy MRS, and lippincott pharm all cover to cover I really regret not having read through the entire FA
Bump. Any other thoughts on Kaplan Medessentials (second edition) versus FA?
Medessentials (2nd edition) is a well-explained, thorough book. I haven't had the time to log in the online material, since the hard copy is more than enough to keep me busy.
However, I am concerned that ME may be geared more towards COMLEX prep than USMLE prep, and I also find it weak in pathology, so I am supplementing it with the BRS/Lange series (OK, for biochem I use Lippincott, any other product is bound to drive me crazy as I am quite irritable when it comes to biochem) and the brand-new two volumes of FA: General Principles and Organ Systems (2009). I also have FA 2005 (a gift from someone who is done) and from time to time go to a bookstore to flip through the one-volume "old" FA 2009 - just to reassure myself for the nth time there is nothing there for me.
I could never study from any edition of the "classical" FA. The 2009 ed is a little better put together than the previous ones but not by much. It's not the details that are lacking, it's their lack of cohesion. I cannot study, or even review, from a book that doesn't have complete sentences. I also have Kaplan's Lecture Notes 2004 (eight-volume set, light blue) and it's not the same thing: they're condensed all right, sometimes frustratingly so, but they're organized in complete sentences, plus a judicious use of bullet-points.
Classical FA has always looked to me as a hybrid between a seventh-grade anatomy coloring book and a collection of mere slogans (the excess of bare-bones mnemonics, isolated facts, laundry lists, whatever you want to call them, makes this book a sphynx to use by itself). I am glad they came around and came up with the two-volume series. I need a little more tasty juicy meat on the bone to make the medicine go down, otherwise I'll break a tooth nibbling at the bone in old FA.
Inspired by Bone Nibbler's moniker, of course....
Last edited:
Advertisement - Members don't see this ad
I'm using MedEssentials as a supplement to FA. I got both books unbound and hole-punched then laid them out in 2 binders by subject according to my study schedule. Basically, I use FA as my main source, but for some of my weaker areas I find ME helpful because it gives more of an explanatory background (embryo, basic phys, anatomy, etc) at the beginning of each section.
ME is definitely more detailed than necessary for a review book, and I agree that the tables can start to blend together after a while. I now mostly use it as a reference and skim the figures to see if it helps clarify anything. Is it necessary? No. Does it help from time to time? Definitely.
I guess I'll see after my test on Monday if I prepared well or not 🙂
ME is definitely more detailed than necessary for a review book, and I agree that the tables can start to blend together after a while. I now mostly use it as a reference and skim the figures to see if it helps clarify anything. Is it necessary? No. Does it help from time to time? Definitely.
I guess I'll see after my test on Monday if I prepared well or not 🙂
Similar threads
