Rohen's Atlas

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Brigade4Radiant

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How good is this book for studying for lab practicals? I did really well on all my written lab exams but I bombed my first lab practical. I believe I need more time with the cadaver outside of dissections. Did anyone find this book really helpful?

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It is a good book. Netter is also good. I used both. But you still need to spend time in the lab identifying things.
 
I had it but i used it very rarely. I lived on campus so i could go into lab whenever and i only used Rohen maybe on the night before practicals but even then i didnt use it everytime. Luckily i got it for free so i'm not too mad about not using it.

I do know a couple of people who used it a lot and they seem to like it
 
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How good is this book for studying for lab practicals? I did really well on all my written lab exams but I bombed my first lab practical. I believe I need more time with the cadaver outside of dissections. Did anyone find this book really helpful?

I bought it toward the end of 1st year, and I really wish I had from the beginning. It's as close as you're going to get to studying from an actual cadaver when you're outside the gross lab.
 
I used it a lot. It was really helpful for me. If you are struggling in the practical part definitely get it. Nothing comes close for real pics
 
While Rohen's is helpful, the best resource is time with the cadaver with someone who knows what they're doing.

If you're bombing practicals, I'd email one of your instructors and ask for a tutoring session with the cadaver. Or arrange a tutoring session with a student who is doing well or an upperclassmen.
At least at my school the instructors were really generous with their time and giving students extra help with the cadavers outside of class. Our school also paid upperclassmen to tutor the first-years.
 
I used it as a primer with netters before going into the lab. I also used it to admire some amazing dissections. I did NOT use it to study for practicals. The dissections are just too good and nothing ever looked that nice in the lab. I love the book, but not as a primary tool for practical studying.
 
For me, I felt that time spent in actually scheduled lab time was sufficient to learn the material well enough the first time through that going through Netter's and Rohen's I would be able to master it. I think Rohen's was best as many times on practicals, after it has been a while, it's easy to get disoriented when you've been looking at Netter's. I wasn't shooting for the top, however, and was not anywhere close to being an anatomy wiz, so take that for what it's worth.
 
I also liked Rohen's for review after spending time in lab.

Once you've found your structures and their relationships with other structures, Rohen's is nice for giving you real images of other cadavers. So was the UMich website.
 
I loved Rohen. I would use my Netter to prep for a new lab and draw pictures out of but Rohen was great for reviewing. You will have to spend more time in the lab as well but Rohen is great for seeing how things should look. I took mine to the lab a couple times but only used it away from the tank.
 
Rohen's is easily the coolest book I own, and it's one of the most useful. I used it mostly for quick and not-so-dirty practical reviews and to get a better look at the smaller structures. I also used it for things with "classical" relationships so I could see what they were supposed to look like. I very much prefer it to Netter's. The cartoon stuff never did much for me.
 
I have the Rohen atlas and like it, but if you haven't bought it yet I recommend taking a look at the Moses photographic Atlas of Clinical Gross Anatomy - one guy in my class had it and I thought the images were a little better.
 
I got Rohen's and Grant's, and regretted it.

Just get Netter's and try to construct a three-dimensional model of the body in your head. In general this involves a lot of staring at Netter's plates and meditation. Don't try to do too much. If you can accomplish this you will be better than 95% of anatomy students.

If you want to identify things in the actual cadaver nothing can replace actually being in anatomy lab with a knowledgeable person (i.e., TA) pointing things out.
 
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If you want to identify things in the actual cadaver nothing can replace actually being in anatomy lab with a knowledgeable person (i.e., TA) pointing things out.
+1 In my humble opinion for actually learning the material there is nothing that can adequately replace just putting time in on a cadaver.

As for the value of Rohens... I found it to be very useful the last few nights before the exam. As a reference in lab though I wouldn't recommend it. Learn the material on the cadaver with a good illustrative atlas (netter, thieme, etc), review it on the cadaver and then use Rohen and Netter's flashcards to test myself. Netter's first then Rohen's. My roommate had Rohen's flashcards and I borrowed those from her. Pretty good. I also checked out Rohen's from the library but never looked at it much. (if you can that is the way I would go, buy the flashcards and check out the book from the library if you want to use it)
 
I loved Rohen's and used it a lot for review. However, you still need to spend time in the lab. The specimens tagged on your practical exams will not be as pretty as the images in Rohen's and you need to be able to look at something that is poorly dissected or covered in fascia and say "Aha! The phrenic nerve!"
 
I love Rohen's. I agree with the previous comments that time with your (and other peoples') cadavers is necessary. However, if you're having a lot of trouble and need a lot of time in the lab, and anatomy is a large part of your curriculum...well, then, there's only so much time you can spend in the lab, right? It might be a good idea to supplement lab time if anatomy is important to you. I think the next best thing is looking at plastinated specimes when you're either short on time or fed up with being in lab.

Maybe not worth buying if you don't think you're going to use it, but perhaps worth asking around in order to borrow.
 
I think Rohen's was a good IDEA for a book, but I don't think the authors executed it very well. I agree with others that it is fun to look at once you sort of know the basic layout of the body, but it wasn't as complete as some other atlases and there are some structures you might only see on one page, as opposed to multiple views like you might see in Netter's (granted, those are cartoon images so it is sort of apples/oranges). I honestly didn't use it much at all. I used Baby Moore and Netter's more.

The atlas I'd really recommend is Gilroy's Atlas of Anatomy. http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Anatomy-Latin-nomenclature-Gilroy/dp/1604060999

What I found worked for me was understanding where the structures were supposed to be, and then reasoning through what I saw when we had the practical exams. I wasn't like "crap what is this" it was more like "well, let's reason through what it can and can't be" then I just went off of what was stressed in lecture/lab. Gilroy's Atlas helped with that learning process. There is no substitute for cadavers though. Look at your's and your friends' cadavers. More = better. Just my two cents.
 
Rohen's is alright but it has some questionable quality of pictures at times. Also every cadaver is different so you're not going to find a carbon copy of what you see in Rohen's on the real thing, and it might just end up confusing.

I would work with Netters personally but to each their own
 
Rohen's is a great atlas, but I preferred to use anatomy dissection videos for my practical reviews rather than searching for things in yet another atlas (I used Grants and Netters for class, neither is sufficient alone IMO). At my school, we have access to multiple sets of videos made by our faculty. I just watched those videos around 3x and started to quiz myself by pausing the video before the prof said what they were pointing at. Much easier than going back down to the lab.

If your school doesn't provide any kind of videos, there are several available online - I know Michigan has them for sure.
 
How good is this book for studying for lab practicals? I did really well on all my written lab exams but I bombed my first lab practical. I believe I need more time with the cadaver outside of dissections. Did anyone find this book really helpful?
Rohen's helped a lot. Drawing out the structures and seeing a real life version was key for me. Repetition.
 
If I could do it over again I'd buy Rohens and Netters in the beginning and be done with it. I only had Netters and was debating about whether or not to buy Rohens the rest of the year. I was so close to buying it right before our head and neck exam on the last weekend. It's a very helpful resource but you may or may not have time to use it.

As others have said, the best thing to do for practicals is spending time int he lab. This was totally foreign to me and I was uncomfortable learning this way, staring in the cadavers, talking with other students, with no books or notes or anything. It feels very low yield, maybe it is. You have to put in a lot of time for it to pay. But it pays HUGE. You'll get an intuitive feel for the way different structures look across bodies. For example, I was master of the neck b/c although it can be a messy area, some of the nerves just start to look characteristic after a while. Certain nerves and arteries have buddies that you look for to make an ID or use as a landmark, things you just don't get from a book. I have always been much more comfortable with my books and highlighters, and I did well in lab from knowing the textbook stuff well, but I wish I had discovered earlier in the year how helpful it is to clock those hours in the lab.
 
I only had Netter's, but I spent plenty of time getting tutored in the gross lab outside of class. It's really helpful since they only tag the bodies that we use in lab (i.e. they don't cart in new specimen for anything). Thus, if you find a body that has a really well-disected out brachial plexus, you can study it figuring there's a good chance that'll be the one tagged. This was especially true for the uterus/fallopian tubes/ligaments etc, since only one or two cadavars still actually had theirs.
 
Seems kind of strange to be a medical student without a picture atlas of human anatomy. I mean, how cheap can one be? Besides, it's one of the few books that the average Joe would expect to see in the library of someone studying medicine. Just buy the stupid thing, even if you never open it.
 
I also liked Rohen's for review after spending time in lab.

Once you've found your structures and their relationships with other structures, Rohen's is nice for giving you real images of other cadavers. So was the UMich website.
I also liked SUNY downstate's website. I used the index page to find good pictures and made my own powerpoint of applicable structures. It also has a quiz mode.
http://ect.downstate.edu/courseware/haonline/bkindex.htm
http://ect.downstate.edu/courseware/haonline/quiz.htm
 
I used Netters as my primary resource and spent a lot of time in lab but found Rohen to be really useful for the days I couldn't make it to the lab and the day of the exam (at my school they shut it down for a while to set up the practicals).
 
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