Board Review Questions

This kitty from ragesoss has an interesting method of studying for the Boards!

Most of the resources on the web for study questions are fee-based, but there are questions at the site for

Resident & Staff Physician.

The Journal, Hospital Physician also has an archive of self-assessment questions.

The Library has Mayo Clinic Internal Medicine Review 2006-2007(WB 18.2 M473), and Swanson's Family Practice Review 2005(WB 18.2 S972).

Look for them in the WB section of the book shelves.

Searching the Literature Part 1: Studies

The "5S" levels of organisation of evidence from healthcare research.
(From Haynes, 2006)

I tend to focus on the bottom of the Pyramid with Studies, the foundation of everything else. I search PubMed, the National Library of Medicine(NLM) database of abstracts from 3900 journals. Sometimes your Attending will want you to read a "classic" study, with an unintelligible acronym. such as TROPHY, STAR, or HOPE, from the base of the Pyramid. I'm glad to help you track these down.

I like to see where info originates, in a librarian-geeky kind of way--an Attending might want this kind of foundational backstory at times, or at other times you need something efficient and relevant to everyday patient care.

A more manageable approach to searching PubMed for Clinical questions, is the Clinical Queries link(under Tools), which leads to a filter for Evidence-Based Studies, as well as Systematic Reviews within PubMed, incorporating the next layer of the Pyramid, Syntheses. More on this next time.

Related Posts:
Searching the Literature Part 2: Syntheses
Searching the Literature Part 3: Synopses
Searching the Literature Part 4: Summaries

Medical Spanish with Audio

Check out Practicing Spanish, for medical professionals. The author is a Spanish teacher living in the U.S. who has also trained as a medical interpretor.

The audio has dialogues between patients and health care providers as well as pronunciation guides, phrases, and anatomy. If you learn best by listening, this site will be very helpful.

Note: Scroll down after choosing a link on this site--for some reason there is a lot of blank space before the info appears.

Related Post:
MedicalSpanish.com