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Studying for Third Year NBME Shelf ExamsMedicine   //    08.19.12  4Chances are, your third year clerkship grades will hinge more on your NBME Shelf exam scores than on your clinical evaluations. The strategy I advocate is to come off of Step 1 strong by immediately shelling out for the USMLE World for Step 2 question bank for the entire year. Do the questions for each rotation.

Take your shelf exams, nervously wait 1-3 weeks for your scores to come back, and soldier on. Then at the end of third year, reset it so you can start fresh and use it to study for Step 2 CK. If you’ve studied for and done well on your shelf exams, UW and Wikipedia will be sufficient for Step 2 CK.

While UW is, I believe, indispensable for several of the shelf exams, it is not sufficient. Here’s how I would approach each clerkship:

 

Psychiatry

First Aid for the Psychiatry Clerkship  is your must read. It’s extremely quick, readable, and hits everything. You can read this book in a day if you want to; it’s that short.

The only book you would need after FA is Case Files Psychiatry. It’s a good volume in the series, and some of the cases do a nice job of distinguishing between adjustment disorder in its many forms (recognizing adjustment disorder versus MDD, GAD, acute stress disorder, and PTSD etc is extremely important for the psychiatry shelf). You don’t need more reading beyond that, just UW. Enjoy the psycation.

More than any other shelf, the psychiatry shelf really stresses adverse effects of its medications. Every important drug has its one or two, and you need to know them cold. All of them.

You also need to pay special attention to medical disorders with psychiatric manifestations (depression and pancreatic cancer, Addison’s disease; pheochromocytoma or carcinoid tumors masquerading as panic disorder; etc).

 

Ob/gyn

Case Files Obstetrics and Gynecology is your first book of the rotation. When in doubt, you can always get through a Case Files book quickly and know that it will hit the highlights (i.e. common board/pimping questions). It’s an excellent foundation for your rotation, and you should read it as fast as possible.

Many people advocate Blueprints Obstetrics and Gynecology, as it is quite readable and nearly exhaustive. I would caution you that unless your rotation has light hours, many many students don’t have enough time or energy to slog through it. Many of my peers who started with Blueprints never finished a single book before taking the exam. They just didn’t have time. Finishing a single book is the most important thing; you need to have one cohesive point of view. Even Case Files alone is better than 3/4 of Blueprints. Don’t get yourself in trouble. Most OBGYN clerkships are exhausting.

If your school pays for the ACOG question bank, great. Use it. If not, I’d just read Case Files again and do UW. Always focus on things that might seem similar and be able to tell them apart (placenta previa vs vasa previa vs abruption). PreTest  is alright if you’re in need of more questions, but I certainly didn’t get through all of it.

 

Pediatrics

Blueprints Pediatrics  is the common favorite (and my wife’s personal favorite as well), and though I personally don’t care for the series, it is certainly sufficient. First Aid is overkill. Case Files Pediatrics (my favorite) and UW for me was enough.

PreTest Pediatrics  is one of the best in the series, and if you have time for more questions after UW, then it’s a good use of your time.

You need two sources. Blueprints + Pretest is a common combination, if you can stand the cardiology section of BP.

Don’t go overboard on vaccine schedules and developmental milestones. You can sink a lot of time into that for little to no benefit. You should know a couple of big milestones per age group. Know the contraindications for vaccines; don’t learn the actual timelines.

 

Surgery

As always, crank through Case Files Surgery  as fast you can so you don’t look like an idiot. Crush Step 2  / Step 2 Secrets  (essentially the same book in different formats, one of which you’ll probably want/have anyway) can also help you get a rapid-fire overview of surgery in less than a night. However, the single best rapid review text is actually the Pestana Surgery Review, written by a now-retired faculty from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. This informal packet is actually used by students around the world, is extremely quick, extremely high yield, and an old copy is available for free via Google (or the official version, I suppose).

Then, before slamming into UWorld with all your might, read the NMS Surgery Casebook. This dense book is your essential read for the clerkship: excellent, organized well, good diagrams, and contains everything you need to know. Note, this is not the NMS Surgery textbook. Don’t bother with that thing. The Casebook is the best resource by far. After that, just do questions. Pay special attention to trauma management, which makes up a lot of the test. Many questions hinge on applying the ABCs properly, often comically obviating the need to know definitive management. If you would do two things simultaneously in real life, never forget that one of them technically comes first based on the ABCs.

Many students use Surgical Recall  to help prep for pimping in the OR. Surgery Recall is a good book for reviewing surgeries and the common questions you are likely to receive/knowledge you need to succeed in-person. I would not, however, rely on Recall as a primary studying guide. Details about actual surgeries are not on the exam; management of surgical patients is.

 

Internal Medicine

The best way to study for IM is to do all of UW medicine. This will take several weeks but will be worth it. The second most important thing you can do is pay attention on the wards.

The favorite medicine text nationwide is Step-Up to Medicine , which is the best (and the third edition just came out). It’s a bit long, and you may find yourself dropping it in favor of getting through the question bank. Case Files Internal Medicine  is decent (helpful mostly if your background is poor and because it’s shorter). First Aid isn’t worth your time. For practical knowledge on the wards, huge swaths of students swear by the “the green book” (Pocket Medicine), though I personally think UpToDate is more interesting and more complete when a computer is nearby.

If you finish UW, do more UW. Nothing else comes close to being what you need.

 

Family Medicine

I leave Family Medicine for last because it’s one of the more irritating tests to study for. Take it later in the year, and it will be mostly straightforward. Taking it toward the beginning of your clerkships can make it the hardest test of the year given its broad scope and the handful of  random questions on every test. If you have the choice, doing it toward the end of third year makes the test far more reasonable.

Medical students can become members of the AFP for free and then use the AFP question bank. I thought these questions were more resident-level than the real thing and didn’t care for them all that much. You can slog through a ton of UW and that would work, but that’s a daunting task for a shorter rotation.

In the beginning of the year, Case Files Family Medicine  would help give you the basics. Later in the year, it will likely just remind you of things you already know quite well. Some people use Blueprints FM  (breadth but not depth) or Step 2 CK review books (try Crush Step 2, if you must). There just isn’t agreat resource. Family practice is not a discrete field; it’s a combination of everything else: mostly medicine, a good helping of peds and ob/gyn, and even a bit of psych, surgery, and EM thrown in. My advice is to schedule it for later in the year, especially after medicine, which makes it quite manageable. Questions, questions, questions.

Some thoughts on how to approach irritating/difficult clinical science questions can be found toward the bottom of this page.

Looking for information on the preclinical shelf exams?Anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and microbiology are here.Pathology is here.

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4 COMMENTS

1. MJ

 01.10.13 at 9:41 pm

Helped a lot. Thanks!

2. Ben

 02.14.13 at 5:15 pm

Agree/disagree regarding NMS. I used the text as primary and Casefiles as secondary. There was a ton left

out in the NMS case files that the text filled in. I would suggest, however, to read the text and skip any

disease processes that has less than a couple paragraphs on as it gets too detailed. But using those two

together was hugely synergistic.

3. Ben

 02.25.13 at 9:27 am

Between Pestana, the relevant sections of Crush Step 2, Case Files, the NMS casebook, and UW (in that

order), I don’t think I had time for any additional resources during my surgery clerkship. While there may

be omissions in the casebook vs the textbook, I had no meaningful gaps in my knowledge for the test with

that line-up.

4. Pingback: Third Year Basics | ben white

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