What keyword review book do you guys recommend?
None.
There will be a lot of dissenting opinions on this one, but I find keywords to be a complete waste of time, especially studying the missed keywords from inservice exams. So you guessed right on a congenital heart disease question, but got a tough preeclampsia question wrong, even though ob anesthesia is your most knowledgable area. Guess you better follow the missed keywords and zero in on ob while it's clear you can blow off congenital heart lesions because you guessed right. In fact, I barely even glanced at what the keyword missed questions were from my inservice exams.
For me I picked a book that wasn't too big for me to master (Barash, Big Miller; I read too slow), nor too small (baby Miller), but just right (Lange) so that I knew it inside out. Aren't you reading about keywords everytime you read a few pages of text anyway? I also obviously read about cases I was doing, and threw in lots of questions and listened to Big Blue CDs by the pool prior to the writtens just to pick up a few random key figures and pneumonics, etc. If you take the tortoise approach, slow and steady from the get-go, and read literally as little as 3 pages a day, you'll get through the Lange book cover to cover each year, you won't waste money on Big Blue books and courses, and you won't sweat or cram with the hare approach for exams.
I don't want to post the exact scores, other than to say my test scores throughout residency put me in a very respectable percentile, and residents that followed me and took a similar slow steady approach all did very well as well. But again, there are multiple ways to do this, and you will hear completely different approaches that worked for others. I never really "studied" for tests, except for the writtens for some added insurance. My philosophy was I'll learn anesthesia and if I do that the tests will reflect it.
