Customer Reviews

Laughing Your Way To Passing The Pediatric Boards: Taking The Boredom Out Of Board Review

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I used other sources for pictures and questions, but I stuck mainly with this book as my primary reference for ABP review and it served me terribly. It goes into too much depth on some issues (even wasting time and print telling you that certain tidbits are not worth knowing), and not nearly enough on some others. The mnemonics are neither useful nor amusing, and only serve to distract you from what meaningful content it does contain. Most topics are covered weakly and there are plenty of factual errors as well. It may help you get a couple questions on the exam; and time spent reading it is not wholly wasted; but there are many other sources that would help you much more and keep you on task and give high-yield info along with the needed depth. Don't get it.

Beeing the lazy bum I am, I waffled till about 8 weeks prior to the boards then scrambled to find a suitable review reference. I wasted 2 weeks and a couple of hundred dollars on two different and equally useless board review books and was starting to panic. Then lo and behold I got a mailing about this book (someone up there must be looking out for me) and it sounded interesting. I read the testimonials online and figured that at this stage I had nothing to lose, so I ordered it along with the crossword and mock board companion books. No it's not cheap, but definitely cheaper than paying the board fee again...
I read it twice from cover to cover as it was an incredibly easy read and definitely entertaining, even though some of the mnemonics and humor were a little over the top (in my opinion still funny though). I only had time to do a few of the crossword puzzles in the companion book which I found to be an excellent and fun way to solidify information. The mock board exam was useless however as the questions were poorly written and I largely skipped it.
I passed! Is this book for everybody? Probably not, especially if you do not have a very loose sense of humor. Remember, this is not some stodgy authoritative reference but a streamlined and filtered board essentials text. It is VERY easy to read which I think is its major appeal.
So I highly recommended, just not eight weeks before the boards unless you have (b... oops) nerves of steel or a very laid back personality...

I ended up borrowing a friend's copy of this book since I couldn't stomach spending so much money for a book filled with someone else's bad jokes. I'd say only a handful of the mnemonics are helpful or easy to remember. But I will give the book credit for covering the majority of what shows up on the actual exam. Reading this book is like having one of your seniors sit down and tell you what came on his/her own board exam and how to recognize the answer. This book suggests that you can supplement with PREP. In fact, if you use this book, PREP should be your primary source and this can be used as a supplement. I took off one star for content (deficiencies and bad mnemonics and one star for the cost relative to content).

Pros:
*good intro explaining approach to studying and exam taking including helpful hints
*some mnemonics are helpful
*does not read like a text
*very good for metabolic/genetic disorders
*accurately covers majority of content on exam

Cons:
*expensive for content
*majority of mnemonics are too hard to remember (might as well just memorize the facts themselves)
*organization not easy to figure out -- not easy to flip to topic of interest
*little to no pathophysiology covered -- something asked quite a bit in the exam
*often does not give specific treatment
*not enough on development, behavior, ethics
*no pictures, EKGs, graphs, etc

I read the reviews on this website, pondered over them, and after weeks of deliberating, decided to invest in this book despite significant apprehension. I made a poor choice. These are the problems:

1) I don't find verbose, convoluted stories to be constructive learning tools. For example, a paragraph in the book on Niacin deficiency.... "Picture a nice scene on a frozen lake. You are skating on the lake and have a cheery outlook because you think you will be free (B3). You accidentally take "Pellagra" instead of Viagra and how have Dementia, Diarrhea, Dermatitis (from falling so many time). Skating with dementia leads to Vertigo witih your tongue hanging out, resulting in glossitis." HUH??

2) I found a lot of inaccuracies in the book, many of which I verified in the Red Book as well as Nelson's. At this point in the game, you really don't want to be second guessing the knowledge you already have.

3) The organization of the book just doesn't work for me. I think they have some nice high yield pointers, but in general, there's so much silly stuff (like the pictorials in the margins) that's distracting.

I would not recommend investing $100 on this book. Flip through a colleague's version before purchasing it.

The idea of this book is a fine one- a concise volume to use as a study guide for the boards, peppered with humor to make an arduous task more enjoyable. Where the author fails is content and execution. The book opens with a passage about meaningless mnemonics, yet it's full of them. There are plenty of misspellings and untruths; at this price I'd expect better copy editing. Finally, and most importantly, I didn't laugh once.

I was very skeptical of this book due to what I perceived as heavy marketing. It was the second book that I got for the boards (the first was one of the AAP book store books) but the first book had so many mistakes in it and was so dry that it was not very useful for me. So I bought this book and loved it. Although it also had many typos, when I emailed the authors they were extremely responsive as well as aware that their editing hadn't been as good as they had expected. That said, this is a huge book with tons of information in it and the typos and errors are minimal considering all that had to be done to produce this book!

I am a hard worker but could never learn just from reading Nelson's or doing PREP questions. Hands-on, applied work is the best way for me to retain. This book is in such a different format, with such a different focus, that it was perfect for me and I only wish that I had spent my time in residency reading this book instead of trying to do "3 pages of Nelson's a day".

Put aside your prejudices (this is NOT type-A, gunner sort of it-has-to-hurt-to-be-real-work reading) and try this book.

By the way, I read it three weeks before the exam as my sole review, was terrified, and passed on my first try.

As a gradute of two residencies I am no stranger to board preparation, so the idea of a humerous guide was piqued my interest.

This book however is not answer. There is no real content. It's superficial fluff that the author decided to market to line his pockets.

There is is an early section on study techniques that is not bad, but the book is more then sub-par. Quite simply it stinks!

6 weeks was all I spent studying for these boards. During those weeks I probably read through this book once, with repeated looking up when I came accross some questions. This was basically my main text. Although by no means thorough, it was extremely high yield. And if you think about it.. I'd rather have 75% of the information for the boards down pat rather than knowing very little about 99% of the topics. What also helped were the two question books also published by this company. It helped to solidify the information in the main text. Along with 4 years worth of PREP questions, that was basically all of my studying material. And I passed, with room to spare. Now mind you, I wouldn't recommend anybody studying in the time frame I did for this exam, but I do recommend the use of this book as a supplement to your studying.

The bad? Well, lotsa errors... but you can download the PDF of all the corrections from the website. I also think they go too far sometimes trying to use weird memory techniques and mnemonics. Sometimes it was just easier for me to memorize them without the use of remembering a strange story or situation.

But overall... good content. I'm glad I used this book.

As the other review noted, there are some typos in the book, which should have been noted, esp. since this is the second edition, but thie book IS definitely WORTH THE MONEY! If you consider that if you don't pass, you have to retake the exam, and that very few % of repeat test takers pass, then a small investment in this book is well worth it!

It tries to make things funny, or at least somewhat humorous, and it does mention some tips on topics and questions that WILL appear on the exam. There are a few places where he mentions "Watch out on the boards for X, Y, z" and sure enough THESE WERE ON THE TEST! It's also fairly comprehensive in it's breadth, and it's easy to read.

Some of the humor was a bit beyond me (mentioning older TV shows or movies) but really, the memory aids and the "freebies" (warnings on types of questions) are definitely a help!

There's not that much review material out there for the peds boards, but this one is a must! It's like First Aid for the USMLE STep 1, this time for the Peds boards!!

This is really a great resource and I am so grateful to have had this book while studying for the boards. I actually bought the newer edition(2008) after I started working through this edition because of the updated information on vaccinations, Ca metabolism and many other sections. If you are going with laughing your way then I personally would use the newer version, although a lot of information is repeated verbatum.
This book helped so much to focus me on the areas of importance and a lot of the practice questions come straight from here-I did this book in conjunction with the last 6 yrs of AAP questions and I passed. Good Luck