How do some of you only spend a day or 2 studying for CS?

[Poit]

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I feel like I have a pretty good "blueprint" or "system" in place to attack every case. I understand that this exam is formulaic, so if you ask certain questions or do certain things, the SP will check off that box for you.

This said, some of the cases in FA throw me for a loop. I know how to tackle chest pain, cough, missed menstrual cycle ect, but there are all these questions that it says you should ask for a diabetes work-up, post-assault or a motor vehicle accident, and some ccs that are tough for me to think of 3 dxs that I know a lot about (heel pain, hearing loss). It seems like this will take me a decent amount of time to get comfortable with the info in this book. How do some of you spend so little time on this?

 

[togaedere]

You can easily pass CS without getting into the nitty gritty of the rarer things. The point of CS is not to see if you can build an accurate DDx for heel pain, but rather can you effectively communicate with a patient, examine them in a reasonable way, and think about a few things that could be causing the problem. Most of the cases are very straightforward if you’ve read about and have a little clinical experience in the main body systems (for example, young woman w RLQ abd pain think about appendicitis, ectopic, torsion) The harder cases will not sink you if you have a handle on the basics but it’s important to stay systematic in your approach so that you can prove to the test writers that you know what to do in uncertainty. I wouldn’t agonize over the weirder chief complaints aside from just going over the cases and building your general knowledge.

I feel like I have a pretty good "blueprint" or "system" in place to attack every case. I understand that this exam is formulaic, so if you ask certain questions or do certain things, the SP will check off that box for you.

This said, some of the cases in FA throw me for a loop. I know how to tackle chest pain, cough, missed menstrual cycle ect, but there are all these questions that it says you should ask for a diabetes work-up, post-assault or a motor vehicle accident, and some ccs that are tough for me to think of 3 dxs that I know a lot about (heel pain, hearing loss). It seems like this will take me a decent amount of time to get comfortable with the info in this book. How do some of you spend so little time on this?