oral review book
Started by MSmentor018
There really is no substitute for practice, and it's hard to get that from a book. You know the medicine - the oral boards are a game, and you have to learn how to play it. And that is hard to really glean from a book, sorry.
I took AAEM's course, which basically had a weekend of mock orals the week before the real deal - it was nearly identical to the real thing and the best prep I think I could have done.
I took AAEM's course, which basically had a weekend of mock orals the week before the real deal - it was nearly identical to the real thing and the best prep I think I could have done.
Oral Board Review Illustrated was all I used.
This is absolutely correct. There's is very little yield from studying written board minutia (not to mention you just passed the written and just did all that studying already).
Mock orals, mock orals, mock orals are what you need to do. That should be 95% of time spent. The oral exams are like no other test you've taken in your entire test taking career. It's all process and learning the game.
Two fictional examples that I made up:
Knowing that bitter almond smell could be cyanide is enough on the written, because it's given in the question stem. On the orals, if you don't ask, "What do I see and smell," which is completely unnatural and something you'd never do in real life, you may miss every single other part of that case, because you never get that key part of the HPI.
Also, the concept of looking at a c-spine lateral, picking up that there's more than 6 mm of edema anterior to C2, but not seeing a fracture then actually having to say, "Place c-spine collar," is completely unnatural, since in real life, most such traumas come in wearing a collar already and it's not knee-jerk to actually say that as you need to on a board exam. Miss that critical action and you lose major points.
If you spend to much time memorizing formulas, every Ortho named-fracture, or environmental zebras, and don't learn the "Oral Exam Game," you could be a 90+ percent written board guy that could legitimately, fail the orals. This is true of the orals, like no other test we take.
I did, maybe 4-6 cases, with a former oral examiner and that's it, and it was not enough. I passed but feel like I very much should have done more. I think doing a legit class for this is an extremely good idea, even if you're an ace test taker and someone who prefers to study solo.
Do a crap-ton of mock cases and dust of the books for odd ball stuff you don't normally see. They could throw some newborn first onset heart disease case at you, or thrown some hot button political case at you (Did you ask about recent travel to Liberia? Well, here's your sentinel case of Ebola, thank you.)
