I'm doing my fam med rotation and am studying from the case files book. It mentions doses for drugs, is that something I should know for the exam or is it just included info?
quick and perhaps stupid q about shelfs
- Thread starter libihero
- Start date
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2008
- Messages
- 183
- Reaction score
- 3
No you don't need to know drug dosages except for maybe some uber important things like 1mg epi 1:10000 vs 1:1000 but even that i highly doubt would show up on a shelf. In real life aka residency you will learn the common ones because you will be using them over and over again.
Knowing major side effects and other considerations about certain drugs are more likely to be fair game. Things like amiodarone (PFTs, LFTs, TFTs) or hypoK with diuretics ect,ect.
Knowing major side effects and other considerations about certain drugs are more likely to be fair game. Things like amiodarone (PFTs, LFTs, TFTs) or hypoK with diuretics ect,ect.
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2010
- Messages
- 1,920
- Reaction score
- 15
I recently took the shelf. Don't bother with dosages and lengths of regimens (PreTest is a bad offender in this because it will have 5 answer choices with different lengths of regimens, which is useless info). You should however know what are the first, second, third line treatments for most common conditions (DM, HTN, CHF, infections), and also what you would give with people who have multiple comorbidities (ex. ACEIs with someone who is both diabetic and hypertensive).
I had only one question which required me to know "numbers" and it was different saline bags (0.1, 0.9, 3.0, etc). It was only one question and was an incredibly stupid one to throw in there.
The shelf was a lot of physical diagnosis and treatment, and some "next step in management" questions.
and pretest goes into the physical diagnosis questions? i'm probably being dense, but i don't really understand what is meant by that. they ask for s/sx of the disease or what you would expect to find? first shelf also...the aafp questions are pretty insanely hard, but currently going through them and just ordered pretest, exam is in 3 weeks.
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2010
- Messages
- 1,920
- Reaction score
- 15
Physical diagnosis = you're given a bunch of physical exam findings and labs and you have to figure out what the person most likely has. This is in contrast to preclinical shelf exams where they would give you some random piece of information like "lipid laden macrophages on biopsy" or something like that. So instead of getting a question where you have someone who has a viral pneumonia and they give a description of the virus structure for you to guess... it'll be more like "patient is a 3 year old who presented to the clinic with cough and wheezing x 2 days" and then give a bunch of lab values indicating lymphocytosis, and that he "goes to daycare"... from which you have to guess that he has a bronchiolitis most likely viral in etiology and therefore most likely RSV.
And yes Pretest is full of those questions.
