I will be starting my Path residency this July and am slightly terrified by the notion of taking step 3 after a year of lab medicine. When have other people taken step 3, and what did you use to study?
Took Step 3 at the end of my PGY2 year. Studied one week and mainly used the Swanson Family Medicine question book (
http://www.amazon.com/Swansons-Family-Practice-Review-Problem-Oriented/dp/032300914X).
Also used Blueprints for CCS which is good bathroom reading. It stresses stupid things (but probably important for the test) such as every patient should be counseled to stop drinking, smoking, and to use seat belts even if they don't smoke or drink, and they use seat belts. Supposedly easy points.
Finally, play around with the CCS software on the CD. You don't have to memorize input orders for every single test. For instance, let's say you do a lumbar puncture...protocol says that you should send some for gram stain, cell count, blah blah. But if you type in "CSF" or something non-committal in the order, all the relevant orders come up and you can click on multiple orders simultaneously to order all those stupid tests.
The test is not bad for two reasons:
(1) Test is likely graded on some kind of curve and the far majority of the folks who take the exam don't care (it's not like people study 1-2 months for this like they did for Step 1).
(2) Step 3 tests on common diseases more than the esoteric stuff. Most of my questions were on garden-variety diseases such as diabetes, chest pain, and hypertension. The only esoteric question I remember was on some weird case of mixed connective tissue disease. I glanced for literally 2 seconds on this question, guessed D, farted, and moved onto the next question. Especially the CCS tests on bread and butter stuff--I can still even remember some of my cases: panic attack, AAA, diverticulitis, intussusception, DKA, PID (gram stain shows gonococcus--but you treat for chlamydia too), and child abuse (parenting FAIL).
