Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vital - get it!, June 1, 2005
For 99% of medical students, this book is essential. BRS Pathology provides a framework that will help you better understand course lectures and materials. It helps provide the "big picture" as a great deal of path is condensed into a few pages a section, with the most important (and board relevant) details. You can do well with simply BRS Path, your course materials, and Google to fill in the gaps. An efficient method I discovered late in the year is to write additional facts straight into the book, and review from that.
What about Robbins? Yes, Robbins has it all, and I gave it a glowing review, but it's good to be honest with yourself if you have the time. I bought it, but didn't use it as much as I liked due to time pressures. (So buy Robbins in addition to BRS Path if you have the money or if you study incessantly and want to work straight from it.)
Questions: there are questions at the end of each section. They seem easy after you've just reviewed the material, yet they're still good for solidifying info/ immediate feedback, or for going to later to assess your retention. There is also a "comprehensive exam" at the end.
Old editions: Newer editions have not changed much content-wise, I think the layout of the newer edition is nicer, but you can get away with an older (cheaper!) copy for sure - I used the original, from 1993!
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A comprehensive review, readable, good tables, January 13, 1999
This book is written for Step 1 of the National Boards. This is a comprehensive review of pathology. The information is clearly written with the most improtant points in bold letters. This makes the matterial easy to absorb. In addition, the information is strictly categorized, and there is little irrelevant and wasteful writing. You will find this quick reading (for a comprehensive review) simply because of the way it is written. Furthermore, each chapter is followed with a short but thorough Q&A review section. Another additional feature is the frequent use of very useful tables, which often give a good understanding of a whole chapter. Although the book is thorough, I have never regretted having read it. I have found it useful even though I did not specialize in Pathology. It is enlightening in just about any general specialty one may be interested in. The book's only short coming is its number of pictorials which are few and far in between.
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27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Written when some of its users were still in junior high, October 28, 2000
By A Customer
This book has strong word-of-mouth press, as well as a glowing review from the First Aid book. Its thickness is intimidating, especially for the BRS series, but the pages aren't too dense, so that it can be covered in its entirety in four days or less. Without having compared it to its competitors, I can still say that it does cover just about everything necessary to study pathology. Sometimes the book is a little skimpy on details that, in my own case, were filled in by previous overlapping study through other subjects.A more substantive complaint is that the book is in dire need of an update: it was published in 1993. For example, the sections on lymphoma classifications and HIV treatment are hopelessly outdated. Along the same lines, the questions at the end of each section and the comprehensive exam at the end don't reflect the current USMLE testing style. For one thing, about 70% of the questions in this book are phrased negatively, as in "all of the following are true, EXCEPT...". For another, many of the questions are quite a bit pickier than my experience with the USMLE step 1 (three days ago). The book also contains far too few photomicrographs, and those are all black and white, but this can be remedied easily with supplemental materials.
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