Books for Clinicals - Internal Medicine/Family Medicine

I've been very very bad. I know and I apologize. I do plan on having a full update soon on my three months of Internal Medicine @ Mount Vernon, my move to NYC, finding housing in NYC, and the differences between clinicals and basic sciences. I hope to roll out these posts in the following days, as well as answer all the questions you guys have been asking, but first I'll start with this fairly easy, yet informative post about books you may want for the start of medicine.

1. Mass General Pocket Medicine
You see this little green book on every single residents on the floor. I love it because it's so concise and clinically oriented. It focuses on how a patient will present with a disease,  abnormal labs, diagnoses, and how to TREAT him/her. When I first started Internal, I had bought the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine and was disappointed because of it's sparse treatment information, which I find is the most important thing to be learning at this stage in our education. Sure we've learned about many diseases, the pathogenesis, how it may present, what abnormal labs we may see, but what do we DO about it? That's what 3rd and 4th year is all about.



2. The Practitioner's Pocket Pal
This handy little book is about 90 pages and gives you the essentials on what you would need to know in the wards. It discusses lab values, what to ask for when taking a history, how to write SOAP notes, progress notes, differential diagnoses for common complaints, a rundown of the most commonly used drugs, ALCS emergency algorithms, and even gives you helpful Spanish-English medical words.... this book has a little bit of everything and I love it. You'll see most students with the Maxwell's Quick Medical Reference book, but I find this one more useful.




3. Download the Epocrates App for Android/iPhone
When it comes to knowing your drugs- mechanism of action, indications, contraindications, dosing, side effects, black box warnings, pregnancy class, pricing (which I find most interesting... no idea how expensive drugs are) this app has everything and you'll be using it fairly often. Another drug app that I've seen students use is the Micromedex... I still like epocrates better because for whatever reason it loads faster on my phone.






Great Books for the Medicine Shelf!!
At the end of each of the 5 cores- internal medicine, psychiatry, pediatrics, surgery, and OB/GYN, AUC students have to take a 2.5 hour, 100 question shelf exam at a nearby prometric center. I took my Medicine one last Friday and feel that I did pretty well on it. Here are the two books I heavily leaned on:

1. Conrad Fischer's Master the Boards for USMLE Step 2 CK

This book really distills the material to clinical presentation, best initial test/ most accurate test for diagnoses, and the step-wise approach for treatment. There is NO in-depth discussion of the pathophys and whatnot of certain diseases because this book basically assumes you know all that information already from basic sciences... so some people may not like this because it is so sparse on that particular material. If you want something to supplement this book, people absolutely love using Step-Up to Medicine, which I've thumbed through and it's actually pretty good. It reminds me a little bit of Goljan since it is in outline form but it does provide more information on diagnoses/treatment options.


2. MKSAP for Students 5
Everyone can agree that doing practice questions is a great way to study for any exam, so most students turn to UWorld. Of the possible 1400 internal questions on UWorld, I probably did around 400 questions and found them to be their usual u-worldy type selves. Then I went on to amazon and one of the "recommended books" on my page was this MKSAP question book. I figured why not buy it and give it a shot and oh my god, I am so glad I did! Not only does it give you amazing explanations and beautiful salient points on the clinical aspect of medicine, but these questions were a perfect match for the shelf. I probably had 5 or so questions that were almost identical. There are 11 sections divided by organ system and I did 5 of them before taking my exam. Had I gone through the whole book...

I should be getting my shelf score tomorrow so I'll let you guys know how I did.
FYI: You need a 53 to pass and a 77 to honor.

update: ended up with a 71... a bit short for honoring, but still pretty good for my first shelf