askdoc-usmle

“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.

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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.

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.

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*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,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Hi everyone. Although it is with a heavy heart, I have decided to temporarily stop writing in my blog or anywhere for that matter at least for the next few weeks or maybe even permanently. A few days ago, I found out that someone from Egypt has been copy-pasting all the contents of my blog to his blog. He edits it to remove all reference to me as well as any links that will identify me as the author. In other words, he has passed off my works as his.

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I have decided to stop writing on this topic in my blog. It seems there is a blog called usmle.egmedicine.com who is not only copying my work, but is editing it to eliminate all references I have to any of my other posts. Not only does he not have the courtesy to ask for permission to republish the contents of my blog, neither does he give any author attribution, he even edited it to erase all references to me or my blog. I believe that is not only rude and discourteous it is pure piracy. The owner of egmedicine is registered as

Dr Mohamed Fouad Fakhreldeen
almahalla
almahalla alkobra, algharbia 31911
Egypt

This has made me lose faith in the honesty and fairness of people who I am trying to help. Doctors who would do this are not doctors worthy of the profession. I’ve seen other people copy my work, either they ask permission from me first or state that it was written by askdoc. This guy, I don’t know how to describe him.

We talked about the importance of Clinical Vignettes in reviewing for the USMLE. You can review the post here. Now we will discuss how to train yourself to diagnose cases based on clinical vignettes. Continue reading »