How to study a medical condition
I have been sharing my medicine study advice, and I wanted to give some advice on how to learn a condition. I was about in the middle of my class, so I don’t claim this is world-beating advice, but it would give you a good start. I still use this format for my surgical summaries.
The Problem: Medicine has no Limits
If I wanted to study pneumonia or appendicitis, I could write reams of text, summarize multiple clinical trials, and end up with a textbook of information. But that is much more than you can hope to keep in your mind, so will remain simply as a textbook, and reference.
The trick is how to make disease summaries that you have some hope of remembering when you are on the ward.
How long should a summary be?
Summaries should be about two pages, possibly three. They should have no joining words, and should be in point form only. Use plenty of headings and subheadings, to help you remember. For more advice on the advantages of learning less, not more, have a look at Study Hacks, particularly this post. An example of good study summaries are the ones here.
The Key Points of a disease
A guest lecturer from the University of Melbourne (the University “across the river” from us) once told us to write summaries in the same way every time. That way, you can have more chance to remember all the summary in an exam, as you can run through the headings (this is an example of how to hack contextual memory). Furthermore, if you do get the opportunity to simply talk about a disease without interruption, it will ensure you can talk in a structured logical way (therefore look cleverer than you really are).
So here are the headings, with some additional tweaks appropriate for modern medicine (Let’s just say I got this list handed to me over a decade ago.)
- Definition of disease
- Aetiology
- Common risk scores
- Prevention
- Incidence (include info relevant to your state and country)
- Pathology
- Clinical findings
- Diagnosis
- Staging/Grading/Classification
- Common Severity scores (eg Ranson/Glascow for pancreatitis)
- Screening
- Differential Diagnosis
- Treatment
- Medical
- Surgical
- Radiotherapy
- Other
- Complications
- Prognosis
- References
- Recent review articles (hyperlink to PDF’s, last 5 years only)
- Textbook references used for summary (include page number)
- Pivotal reference articles (occasionally there are some papers that consultants in the area refer to by name because they vastly change practice. Chase down the references so you can look them up if you need to)
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Include if relevant:
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Include if relevant:
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Include if relevant:
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Include if relevant:
Do you agree? Are there any other topics we should include in the list? Please leave your own advice on medical summaries in the comments.
Related posts:
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- How to pimp your study recall using contextual memory Human memory formation is a bit unconventional. We are...
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Excellent advice. Where were you when I was torturing myself these last four years? Still better late than never, right?