I'll start with this: it's great to be back.I've been on hiatus from blogging for the past few months because of the exam I took last week: the medical boards, or Step 1, an eight hour test that covers all of the first two years of medical school to prepare us for the hospital wards. To give you an idea of what it entails, most second-year medical students use a 550-page review book as a scaffold that at the minimum gets memorized. Subjects include anatomy, physiology, pathology, biochemistry, pharmacology, microbiology, immunology, embryology, and others. One physician writer described the first half of medical school like this: "It was like being asked to enter a grocery store and memorize the names of every product in the store , their number and location, every ingredient in every product in the order in which they appear on the food label, and then to do the same thing in every grocery store in the city." The test was not so much one of depth, but rather of immense, extreme breadth. [More]














Source: From classrooms to hospitals: when medicine doesn t have all the answers