May 29

“Study the High yield stuff”. “Don’t bother with that because it’s low yield”. When I was just starting my review, these are the most common advice I get from “experts” in forums and books about reviewing for the USMLE. The question is how good is this advice.

Continue reading »

May 20

I would like to announce that I’ve compiled my series of posts on “How to Create a Study Plan for the USMLE” into an eBook in PDF format. I’ve also included the last 4 posts and completed the series. It is downloadable from this site. This ebook is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 unported license.

You may distribute this ebook under the following conditions:

  1. That the work will be preserved as is and you will not edit, alter or build on this work.
  2. That you will properly attribute this work to its authors, askdoc.
  3. That you will not use this work for commercial purpose.

Download the file by clicking this link: How to Create a Study Plan for the USMLE

If you have a blog or a website, feel free to use my links so you do not use your own bandwidth. The link is http://downloads.we-r-ebooks.com/study-plan.zip

If you want to email this ebook to a friend, you can either email the ebook itself or the link.

Thank you for your patience. I will continue to write about the USMLE and hopefully help more people achieve their dreams of becoming US physicians.

May 16

Note: This article was originally written and posted by me on prep4usmle.com. It talks about how to increase our ability to acquire knowledge. Part 1 is on How we learn which is posted here and Part 2 is this post on how to increase our reading speed . You can access the original post in prep4usmle here.

Now we go to speed reading.

The main reason that we read so slowly is the way reading was taught to us when we were younger. The two main reasons is:

  1. We tend to read word for word.
  2. We tend to subvocalize when we read.

Continue reading »

May 15

*Note: I wrote this a while back in prep4usmle.com. You can access the original article here.

I’ve used this framework for analyzing my weak points throughout my review.

We can divide our whole preparation into 3 parts,

Continue reading »

May 14

Note: This article was originally written and posted by me on prep4usmle.com. It talks about how to increase our ability to acquire knowledge. Part 1 is on How we learn and Part 2 is on how to increase our reading speed which is posted here. You can access the original post in prep4usmle here.

We’ve discussed the concept of Mastery Know and Familiar in our Knowledge level and how this will impact our performance in the exam. Continuing our KA discussion, we will discuss 2 topics that is important in increasing our ability to acquire knowledge.

Continue reading »

May 13

Note: I wrote this sometime ago to help out somebody who was having difficulty in her review. It was posted in prep4usmle. It illustrates the use of the concept of Master, Know and familiar in preparing for the USMLE.

This part is especially for gigiMD.

Just like any diagnostic exam, our quick and dirty evaluation has its share of false positives.

While most people who have a KA, KR or TP problem really have a KA, KR or TP problem. A minority have a mixed problem, combination KA,KR or KA, KR, TP problem. They often evaluate themselves to having a KR or TP problem and so missed out that they also have a partial KA problem.

Continue reading »

May 12

Note: I wrote and posted this sometime ago in prep4usmle.com. Since it is impossible to know everything there is to know about Medicine, one should prioritize what medical concepts should be retained. Another post talks about how this can be implemented.

Thanks for reading my post and your kind comments. To continue.

As we all know, Medicine is a very broad subject, so broad that we are divided into specialties. However, for the purpose of the board we are required to know a little of everything. So for the purpose of the board, What you need to know is divided into 3 parts.

Continue reading »

Verse of the Day

"I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh." (John 6:51, ESV)