Customer Reviews

Students Edition from Singapore: Ise First Aid Medicine Clerkship (First aid for the clinical clerkship)

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

 

 

First Aid for the Medicine Clerkship is a great book that gives you the key facts about many diseases. This is information that will help you answer questions during rounds and on exams. It's very well done, with nice illustrations. It's easy to get through, which is important since there's so much to learn during the Internal Medicine rotation (and not enough time!). I also recommend:

1) Practical Guide to the Care of the Medical Patient by Ferri because you need something to help you take care of patients. First Aid for the Medicine Clerkship isn't great for managing patients or working them up

2) Tarascon Pocket Pharmacopoeia because you need something for drug information (if you have epocrates, then you don't necessarily need this). First Aid for the Medicine Clerkship doesn't have much about drugs. Another plus is it's fairly cheap.

3) Internal Medicine Clerkship: 150 Biggest Mistakes because you need something that gives you the nuts and bolts of the rotation. This book tells you how to preround, give great oral case presentations, prepare complete write-ups, and impress during attending rounds. A lot of tips on how to get great evaluations. Not much of this is is in First Aid for the Medicine Clerkship.

4) Access to uptodate or some other medicine reference to help you work up patients.

5) Pretest book - you need to do questions before the shelf exam.

Bottom line is First Aid for the Medicine Clerkship is a great book but you need other things to help you do well during the rotation. Good luck!

The best book I have used in medical so far. Questions I was pimped on during rounds, issues relevent to patient management, weird physical exam findings, strange syndromes (Felty's anyone?)were all covered in this book. I pretty much memorized the whole book, and all my attendings and residents during my medicine clerkship commented that my fund of knowledge was excellent. Everyone gave me honors, and it was literally all because of this book. Probably not adequate enough for the NBME shelf exam however, but combine it with some old kaplan step 2 questions and honoring that should be no sweat either. GET THIS BOOK!

Reading First Aid is a very effective use of time. The book is reasonably long (considering the breadth of Internal Med) and hits the basics for working up various diseases. If there's something in First Aid you don't know, you should know it. First Aid also has side boxes with more obscure pearls of wisdom (e.g., isolated gastric varicies = splenic vein thrombosis) that does get asked by attendings and on tests. Since First Aid is relatively brief and written more in a check-list format, it's much more helpful to analyze it several times than leisurely cover it once. You have to memorize Light's criteria, not simply have a vague idea of it. If I just read this book, I wouldn't like it. Instead, I would cover up knowledge and try to actively recall it.

That said, First Aid is just a foundation. I found Pocket Medicine an outstanding compliment for the wards (EVERYbody had it on Internal Med). It's like a Pocket Doc. If you need further elaboration on a subject, I would use this. Why not just use Pocket Medicine? Well, it's a little too dense/long (although it does fit well in a white coat).

Also helpful are practice questions. MKSAP 2 and 3 for students were good for this. First Aid tends to list the classic signs and symptoms for a disease, but MKSAP shows how board examiners would put it into question form.

In summary, First Aid is a great foundation for an overwhelming rotation. If you like reading texts, Medicine by Fishman et al might be good. I preferred First Aid, though, because I could look at it and not get a headache. I felt confident during my rotation and scored in the 98th percentile on the shelf (though luck is a part of that...)

Well, I have to say errors. I dont know who fact checked this book but I hope it wasn't a doctor. How many errors can one book have? I am only half way through and I have found at least 10. These are not small spelling or grammer errors. They are errors that could get someone killed. How about coagulation factors all being increased in DIC? or TIBC being decreased in iron def. anemia? The book should be returned to the publisher. My words of advice, read something else if you want to learn something correctly.

This is a concise book, perfect for MSIIIs starting their IM Clerkship; it is also great for Step 2 review and the Medicine Shelf. MSIIIs can use this as an IM starting point and fill in the details concerning their own patients using Harrison's, Up to Date, or Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment.

Great book. It's like a potent offering of what you need to know for your Medicine clerkship. It is highly distilled, has quick easy-to-read facts/pearls, and leaves out the crud. I lost mine but I am constantly wanting to go back and review it. I may just buy it again, even though I am done with my Medicine rotation and I am pursuing Surgery as a career.

You can read my comparative amazon review of 3 titles - 'Blueprints Medicine', 'First Aid for the Medicine Clerkship', and 'Step-Up to Medicine' - at 'Step-Up to Medicine', ISBN:0781747872

Ugh, I have been very frustrated with the lack of good FA books. They were superior for step 1 and psychiatry, but other renditions are just feeding off the good name. I am afraid that this book is one of the parasites the plague the series and keeps it from being top notch. I have to agree that there are multiple errors in the book. Not just minor errors, but major problems. For example, MUDPILES is commonly used to denote conditions that cause increased anion gap metabolic acidosis. The "E" stands for ethylene glycol, antifreeze, but this book indicated that it is ethanol. This is a glaring error. Unfortunately these mishaps here and there make this book somewhat of a disaster. I commonly found myself wondering if the book was accurate enough to trust. I also had a hard time translating the dry bullet points into something of clinical relevance, and key points on the side margins just didn't fill the gap of clinical relevancy enough for me. That is not to say that it is all bad. Its bullet point style cuts the length of the book down to a reasonable length. It is long enough to cover most all of the topics that you will find on the shelf exam. Overall, I would be wary of this book. I found the step up to internal medicine, though lengthy, to be a much better source.

This is an excellent resource for your needs in Internal Medicine rotation. It delivers pertinent and well organized information. It also provides "pearls" relating to each subject area that bring the information down to practical application. It should not be your only source but definitely will complement the others.

This book follows the standard first aid format, serving as a decent outline of the material you'll need to know for the medicine clerkship and shelf. It's a great review tool if you already have a grasp of the material. However, it completely skims over underlying concepts focusing on teaching buzzwords and quick associations, so not a great text to use as your primary teaching tool if you want to learn the material in any greater depth than cramming.

Additionally, the second edition has a lot of errors, both typos and factual. Some winners include stating that Plasmodium ovale is the cause of Tinea Versicolor (it causes maleria), and telling you to use cefixime for Pseudomonas coverage (use ceftazidime or a 4th generation cephalosporin)