Pre-Clinical Studying

[pathologyDO]

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We just finished up our first section of M1 and I feel like I got slammed! I managed to pull off an A on the midterm but the final kicked my ass, mainly due to the fact that questions were clinically or case-oriented. Our sections are systems based, I might add.

So, I just ordered First Aid Cases, and am looking for any other guide to help me with practice with clinical cases, as its obvious that without practice questions similar to those seen on the test I will not be able to score as high as I want.

Does anyone have recommended books, programs, or study strategies for me?

 

[dextor2003]

Pre-test Clinical Vignettes seems to have some really intense clinically oriented questions for various subjects. I think maybe that's what you're looking for? BRS also has some good ones in their anatomy book, but the others, from what I've seen at least, seem to be for mainly just hammering down concepts and details. Try em out though if you want.

 

[Evil_Abed]

For subjects like physiology, Costanzo (the author of the textbook and BRS) also has a Physiology Case Book -- it's really good and goes along with the text and BRS really well. For anatomy, the UMich website questions are great. For biochem, there should be clinical correlations brought up with any pathway that's clinically relevant.

To be honest, you should have either been lectured on it or have had enough information in the question stem to answer clinically-oriented questions during M1/M2 years. If it's a badly written exam, that just sucks. Pretty much every review book that's recommended on SDN for each subject should contain all the clinical correlations you'd need to know at this point.

 

[pathologyDO]

Thanks guys, will def check out those suggestions.

While I agree that the info we were given should give us the ability to answer these cases, they're still presented in a way that makes it difficult.

For example, we have 200 q's that may have 5+ sentences per question and they're full clinical based questions. They might explain the HPI and then ask which type of immune cells would/wouldn't be changed, or something of that sort and while we have been given raw facts, sometimes it's hard to be able to answer those types of questions with accuracy without having seen the info in clinical form beforehand.

 

[hmockingbird]

The practice questions in the review books already mentioned should definitely help - but there's a good chance you are not going to see every clinical scenario before the test so I would use those to focus on strategy. Others are right, you will have been given the information you need to answer, the key is to parse out the relevant information from the question stem to figure out what they are really asking, and then use your class knowledge to figure out how to answer.

For example say you have a question about a kid who presents with repeated infections. This should immediately make you think that the question is about immune deficiency diseases. Your next step is to find the most helpful information in diagnosing these types of diseases. My questions would be 1. What type of infections are they? (viral, bacterial, both, pyogenic vs. nonpyogenic, Neisseria, etc all lead you to different types of deficiencies which should have been covered in class); 2. What is the child's sex? (boy=more likely to have an X-linked disorder); 3. How old is the child? (younger=more severe) By now I should already have some possibilities in my head for what it could be. If they give labs, I use the labs to see if that matches up with my hypothesis. If not, they will probably give you a really clear story that leads you to one disease over another. So then you boil it down to what they are "really" asking which is something like: "Which antibodies (or which white blood cells) would be decreased in someone with Bruton's agammaglobulinemia?" or "Which immune deficiency presents with increased risk of Neisseria infections?" or "What is the treatment for SCID?" etc.

Just go through the questions very methodically like that at first, and eventually you will be able to do that faster and also be able to quickly scan the questions for clinically relevant information for your current class. HTH

 

[JJMrK]

Thanks guys, will def check out those suggestions.

While I agree that the info we were given should give us the ability to answer these cases, they're still presented in a way that makes it difficult.

For example, we have 200 q's that may have 5+ sentences per question and they're full clinical based questions. They might explain the HPI and then ask which type of immune cells would/wouldn't be changed, or something of that sort and while we have been given raw facts, sometimes it's hard to be able to answer those types of questions with accuracy without having seen the info in clinical form beforehand.

It's great your school puts together tests like this. As you're probably aware, this is basically the format of all of the shelf exams and steps 1 and 2 CK. It's hard at first because it's a different style than you're used to, but the more practice you have, the better you'll do. Practice questions are probably the key to doing well. Keep up the hard work and you'll be fine.