"just" first aid - for what it's worth

[doctorFred]

out of curiosity, i decided to go through 100 questions from the kaplan qbank with first aid sitting in front of me. the point was to see how many questions could be answered with a mastery of first aid alone.

overall, 14 out of the 100 questions were not answerable from the material in first aid. i should point out, however, that (this being qbank, after all) many of the unanswerable questions were truly bizarre. they included:

-- indications for the use of riluzole
-- antitopoisomerase antibodies
-- the Halstead-Reitan battery
-- the effect of antacids on ofloxacin
-- Laron dwarfism
-- specific staging of Hodgkin's (IIIA vs IIIB)
-- the reagent that stains gram negative organisms (safranin)
-- the suboccipital triangle
-- progressive supranuclear palsy

i'm wondering what the results would be if the same experiment were carried out with USMLEworld.

p.s. -- 86% on the real thing is about 245ish.

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[RussianJoo]

Yes I agree with you.. I also feel like if you know FA cold.. like everything in it, backwards forwards and diagnolly, then you can do very well on step1. I almost feel like I should have just spent my time memorizing FA like 10 pages a day..

 

[alpha06]

Tru...some of the questions from kaplan qbank or any qbank for that matter are unanswerable if you just use FA....but you are forgetting that FA is just a HY guide to boards. You get all the low-yield stuff from the first two-years of med school. Provided you did well in those classes and use FA, you would have been able to answer the majority of those 14 or so Qs that were unanswerable...

 

[pballa24]

out of curiosity, i decided to go through 100 questions from the kaplan qbank with first aid sitting in front of me. the point was to see how many questions could be answered with a mastery of first aid alone.

overall, 14 out of the 100 questions were not answerable from the material in first aid. i should point out, however, that (this being qbank, after all) many of the unanswerable questions were truly bizarre. they included:

-- indications for the use of riluzole
-- antitopoisomerase antibodies
-- the Halstead-Reitan battery
-- the effect of antacids on ofloxacin
-- Laron dwarfism
-- specific staging of Hodgkin's (IIIA vs IIIB)
-- the reagent that stains gram negative organisms (safranin)
-- the suboccipital triangle
-- progressive supranuclear palsy

i'm wondering what the results would be if the same experiment were carried out with USMLEworld.

p.s. -- 86% on the real thing is about 245ish.

Haven't done it as systematically as you but whenever I review the answers after a 50Q block of UW I use FA to help/annotate what's not in the book; and it does seem like the majority of the qstns are answerable via FA alone. That is given, of course, that you know FA like the back of your hand (alot of the "answers" I found in FA were more or less one word in parenthesis. Ridiculous. But after completing a little over half of UW this way I am convinced that knowing FA backwards and fowards, FOR ME, is a must!

I understand that not everything is in FA, how could it be? But if you studied your first 2 years, use some other books as resources when FA gets vague, and take notes in it I think it can be the utlimate study guide. I think what some people get caught up in when they say FA is not enough is that when they go through and read it they're high-yielding the already high-yield information! They'll underline some stuff and highlight this word and move on. You can't really highlight FA. Everything in it is important. I would recommend, as a last resort maybe for some and an idea for those with no game plan and little time, to go thru FA and use Goljan as your ligase...to fill in the gaps, right. Get it... Horrible. But he is the man so who knows maybe he can ligate DNA.



I need to continue my learning quest now.

 

[ROBINHO]

I believe most of the stuff we gotta know is in First Aid but unfortunately the questions come in a different form. For example u know that Cyanide toxicity...antidote Nitrites. But in the exms they won't ask u the question dirctly. They will come with a story like Sodium Nitroprussite infusion and blah blah symptoms what is the antidote??? and that is where the difficulting in integrating comes

 

[AK_MD2BE]

I have to respectfully disagree with the OP. I performed a similar experiment with UWorld. Out of 300 UWorld questions, only 62% could be answered with First Aid. Conclusion...if you know First Aid absolutely cold, front, back, etc...you could get about a 60% on UWorld, which seems to be the equivalent of about 230 (based on what previous posters have reported.)

 

[DwyaneWade]

I have to respectfully disagree with the OP. I performed a similar experiment with UWorld. Out of 300 UWorld questions, only 62% could be answered with First Aid. Conclusion...if you know First Aid absolutely cold, front, back, etc...you could get about a 60% on UWorld, which seems to be the equivalent of about 230 (based on what previous posters have reported.)

Agreed. FA alone is not enough for UWorld, and not enough to break 230 IMHO

 

[45408]

Interesting. I'm glad somebody (other than me) sat down and tried this. I've wondered this before. Some of those questions seem a bit too nit-picky for the actual boards, but maybe I'm overestimating the NBME. Probably half (or more) of those questions could be answered with a good path review book, so I would never tell anyone to study for step 1 without a path review book.

 

[marthpodi]

-- the effect of antacids on ofloxacin

Do you mean that flouroquinolones shouldn't be taken with antacids, cause FA2008 mentions that. Or were they asking the specific biochemical effect of taking the two together?

 

[doctorFred]

Do you mean that flouroquinolones shouldn't be taken with antacids, cause FA2008 mentions that. Or were they asking the specific biochemical effect of taking the two together?

i have the 2007 version. or, if it's in there, i just didn't know what class of drugs ofloxacin was in and missed it.

 

[doctorFred]

I have to respectfully disagree with the OP. I performed a similar experiment with UWorld. Out of 300 UWorld questions, only 62% could be answered with First Aid. Conclusion...if you know First Aid absolutely cold, front, back, etc...you could get about a 60% on UWorld, which seems to be the equivalent of about 230 (based on what previous posters have reported.)

i'm not sure what you're disagreeing with. i said that i used qbank, and hadn't tried this with world yet. and really, the estimates for question bank percentiles have a pretty broad standard deviation.

 

[jbuck824]

Agreed. FA alone is not enough for UWorld, and not enough to break 230 IMHO

wade....i believe that world fills in the gaps for first aid and based on what i keep hearing first aid+world=240+....

i will say i am not sure if first aid is enough for pharm and behavioral...what are your thoughts

 

[Instatewaiter]

I have heard that outside of some mechanisms that are absent in FA, FA is pretty good for pharm.

 

[ASDIC]

I have heard that outside of some mechanisms that are absent in FA, FA is pretty good for pharm.

FA sux for pharm haha.....let me see if you can get atleast 70% of the pharm questions in uworld correct just by using FA

I had some drugs on my test which were not in FA..

 

[alpha06]

FA sux for pharm haha.....let me see if you can get atleast 70% of the pharm questions in uworld correct just by using FA

I had some drugs on my test which were not in FA..

So which pharm resource would you recommend?

 

[DwyaneWade]

wade....i believe that world fills in the gaps for first aid and based on what i keep hearing first aid+world=240+....

i will say i am not sure if first aid is enough for pharm and behavioral...what are your thoughts

The subjects that would worry me with FA alone would be pathology (in general), neuro, and biochem (depending on your background). FA+World might equal 240 if you were a stud for the first two years, but I think a Path book is requisite.

I am surprised what people have said about pharm, it is my weakest subject but studying FA alone has gotten me to a good point on UW questions.

 

[medstu2006]

out of curiosity, i decided to go through 100 questions from the kaplan qbank with first aid sitting in front of me. the point was to see how many questions could be answered with a mastery of first aid alone.

overall, 14 out of the 100 questions were not answerable from the material in first aid. i should point out, however, that (this being qbank, after all) many of the unanswerable questions were truly bizarre. they included:

-- indications for the use of riluzole
-- antitopoisomerase antibodies
-- the Halstead-Reitan battery
-- the effect of antacids on ofloxacin
-- Laron dwarfism
-- specific staging of Hodgkin's (IIIA vs IIIB)
-- the reagent that stains gram negative organisms (safranin)
-- the suboccipital triangle
-- progressive supranuclear palsy

i'm wondering what the results would be if the same experiment were carried out with USMLEworld.

p.s. -- 86% on the real thing is about 245ish.

Thanks for the correlation. I'm sticking with FA for now and when I start doing questions, I hope UW fills in the gaps. I wonder what the correlation would be between the questions on the NBME forms and FA material.

 

[Mediculous]

I would bet there is a strong correlation between the NBME questions and FA material. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that every single factoid in FA is based on feedback from students' USMLE experiences. The NBME exams are old USMLE questions(some are supposedly still being used), so FA should cover a lot of the NBME material. It seems like everything that is in FA has been on Step 1, but not everything that has been on Step 1 is in FA.

 

[g6pddfishnc]

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[jbuck824]

The subjects that would worry me with FA alone would be pathology (in general), neuro, and biochem (depending on your background). FA+World might equal 240 if you were a stud for the first two years, but I think a Path book is requisite.

I am surprised what people have said about pharm, it is my weakest subject but studying FA alone has gotten me to a good point on UW questions.

definitely true..i guess i should have clarified my point that if you read thru a book of each subject early on and annotated your first aid (esp the path portion) then you should be set...

personally i went thru RR path 6 weeks before the test (have 3 weeks left) and am not sure if its worth spending 5-7 days at this point in reading it again...

for a slacker like me who still has to do 100q's a day for the next 2 wks to finish world (did qbank early) im hesitant about spreading myself too thin with books...

just gonna go with FA and goljan audio+world and perhaps HY clinical correlations in anatomy since i have not covered anatomy

i actually thought FA biochem was pretty good though i had read thru RR biochem earlier and it was a beast in some parts...i will say that the Fatty acid crap in FA is weak and i had to annotate the hell out of my first aid for the metabolisms section...

wish i had seen TAUS plan earlier...seems very thorough and a great method for those who have yet to start studyin

i've concluded that pharm is just something you gotta keep goin over...these side effects are killer...but from what ive heard FA pharm is actually really good...so i'll roll the dice there...

still tryin to figure out if the pictures in HY anat/neuro anat are sufficient..have also heard good things about webpath...i think those 3 source+ FA images are sufficient...