Tag Archives: internship

Eating on the Run

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“Downside, I skipped lunch and it is still in the work fridge. Upside, I don’t have to pack a lunch tomorrow!” – tweet from an intern on her first day

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It’s hard to eat well when you are crazy busy taking care of patients. Doctors really do know about nutrition, and we know we should set a good example. So why do we eat so poorly at work?  I can’t do better than the list of reasons from this post:

1.  The ”I don’t know when I’ll get to eat again” Phenomenon

2.  The “Graham Crackers and Peanut Butter” Phenomenon

3.  The “It’s free, therefore I must eat it” Phenomenon.

4.  The “I’m so tired I have to eat something to stay awake” Phenomenon

5.  The “I’m on call so I deserve a giant cookie” Phenomenon

Why it’s important to make conscious choices about what you eat at work 

1. You actually hurt your patients if you don’t eat well. 

Physicians that don’t eat at work have slower simple and complex reaction times. You don’t think as clearly or respond as quickly. Start thinking about your own nutrition as a part of good patient care.

 2. If you are like most people, not eating at work will result in gaining weight.  

Even if you don’t gain weight, you will likely have a detrimental change in your body composition. (i.e. you’ll get flabby)

3. Not eating at work will result in losing weight for some people. 

For some people stress leads to appetite loss.  These are the residents that aren’t hungry even though they are not eating enough. The message here is that your weight during residency is a decent barometer of your stress level and how well you are coping.  If you are losing or gaining, notice it early and adjust how you are eating, working out and coping with the stress of your job.

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There’s no question that the best option is to plan, prepare and bring your own food to work.  Even though it takes time to do this, you’ll save time in the hospital by knowing what you have and where it is.  (A good point made in the article “Strategies Resident-Physicians Use to Manage Sleep Loss and Fatigue” which you can download from http://med-ed-online.net/index.php/meo/article/download/4376/4558). Food choices in the hospital are limited, often poor,  and not always available. Make time on the weekends to plan for the upcoming week and shop for good food.  If you can, choose one healthy recipe to cook on your day off and make enough that you have plenty of meals in the refrigerator for when you get home.

General principles 

  • Eat at least every 6 hours.  It’s probably better if you eat smaller amounts every 3-4 hours.  Eat even if you are “not hungry” if it’s been 4-6 hours since your last meal.
  • Make sure you are getting plenty of protein.  Eating simple carbohydrates makes you less alert and creates bigger swings of insulin levels.
  • Don’t drink your calories.  (But do drink enough water)
  • The processed comfort foods that appear like magic in hospitals (doughnuts, pizza, etc) seem delicious when you eat them, but are terrible for you.
  • Plan, plan, plan.  It’s worth it.
  • Eat fruits and/or vegetables with every meal.
  • Bring good food from home.  If you don’t cook, buy good food to bring.
  • Make sure you have “pocket food” in your pocket at all times.  (Food that fits in your pocket and doesn’t need refrigeration.) You may not be able to stop for a real meal, but you’ll be able to eat something.

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Examples of  “pocket foods”

  • Kind bars.  Many meal replacement bars might as well be candy bars when you look at the ingredients.  Clif, Larabar, and Odwalla are all good choices.  Kind bars have no added sugar, a fair amount of protein and are made of only real food.
  • Peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  (Whole wheat bread, fruit spread, peanut butter without transfats)
  • Cabot 50% cheese or string cheese (higher protein, lower fat than most cheese)
  • Edamame (shelled is easier)
  • Homemade Trail mix – mix different nuts and dried fruits together and put in snack bags
  • Baked or steamed sweet potatoes with a little salt
  • Fruit

Duty Hours, Interns and Training Doctors

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For most people, talking about a 16-hour workday is outrageous.  For doctors in training, it may not be enough.

Training doctors is not easy.  It’s not just a matter of learning what is in the books or latest articles. Under the supervision of attending physicians, young doctors learn the art of doctoring by staying with and caring for their patients.  Because of the work they do while they are learning, resident salaries are supported through Medicare… mostly.  That’s another issue, but not unrelated to the issue of duty hours.

Twenty years ago, it wasn’t unusual for an intern to arrive at 5 or 5:30 in the morning, work all day, stay up all night on call, and then work the following day until evening rounds were finished.  That meant 36-hour shifts and many weeks with more than 100 hours in the hospital.  It was clear that this wasn’t sustainable, nor was it safe.

residents-sleeping

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After much debate, in 2003, the initial duty hour regulations were put into effect.  In a nutshell, residents couldn’t work over 80 hours a week (on average) and they weren’t allowed to stay longer than 24 hours.  If they worked all night, they had to go home the next day.  In 2011, the regulations were revised.  The major change was that interns (residents in their first year of training) could only work 16 hours in a row instead of 24.  On the surface, this made sense.  Fewer hours should mean more sleep.  More sleep should mean rested interns and fewer mistakes.

I wasn’t surprised to read the article published by Time magazine entitled “Fewer Hours for Doctors-in-Training Leading To More Mistakes.”  This report, summarizing the on line JAMA Internal Medicine article from this week, noted that “interns working under the new rules are reporting more mistakes, not enough sleep and symptoms of depression.”  In the same issue, authors from Johns Hopkins reported the results of a prospective, randomized crossover trial comparing the new regulations (16 hr work day) to a 24 hours work day with the next day off. They showed no significant difference in the number of hours the interns slept per week between the 16 hour and 24 hour shifts.  However, there was a marked decrease in educational opportunities, a significant increase in the number of handoffs, and less resident satisfaction with the 16 hour work day.  Most importantly, both the interns and the nurses caring for patients felt that the quality of patient care was decreased by the 16 hour duty hour regulation.

Why would there be more mistakes? Patient care is usually transferred in the morning (to the entire team) and in the evening (to the resident covering the patients at night).  That’s roughly every 12 hours.  When a portion of the team is rotating on a 16-hour schedule, it results in more handoffs (usually to fewer team members). Increasing the number of times information is transferred between doctors means increasing the risk of communication errors.

If they are working fewer hours why are they not more rested?  The new regulations almost require a “night float” system to insure that the patients are taken care of.  Working nothing but nights for one week a month followed by 16 hour days is not conducive to being rested.

Why are interns depressed? Remember, decreasing intern work hours didn’t change how much work there was to do in a day – and most hospitals didn’t respond by hiring more people to help.  Interns worry that they are “dumping” on their colleagues because they are being required to leave earlier than the other residents.  Less obviously, they are learning to be professionals but are being treated like they can’t “take” the hours of the residents one year above them. The message is subtle but real.  There’s also a perception that the quality of patient care is decreased by the new system – which is reason enough for a young doctor to feel bad.

Education is clearly impacted.  These studies document what we have all observed on the wards.  Interns working 16 instead of 24 hours admit and follow fewer patients.  In the surgical specialties, they participate in fewer cases.  They also attend fewer teaching conferences.

The solution to this complex problem isn’t going to be easy.  It’s an ongoing struggle to balance service vs. education, fatigue vs. experience and, maybe most importantly, how we pay for the incredibly important mission of training doctors.

I’m working hard to be part of the solution – along with everyone else in medical education.  We owe it to the future physicians we will train and the patients they will take care of.

How to Succeed in Residency: Studying

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Today is the “official” first day of residency. If you are one of the ~16, 000 new interns starting today I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that you are already behind in terms of what you need to know. The good news is that you can come up with a plan that will make a big difference. If you are a PGY2 or greater, this is a great time to reapply yourself to your studies – even if you let it slide last year.

 “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.  The second best time is today.”  Chinese Proverb

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As an intern or resident, you learn your specialty from a variety of sources. Each of them is important. Some of your studying will be just like medical school with your gluteus maximus in a chair (or feet on a treadmill or ischial tuberosities on a bike or an exercise ball) reading a textbook. But the rest of what you learn is absorbed as you make rounds, attend conferences and take care of patients.

The challenge is organizing what you learn.

Sometime this week you will do your first central line, or see a case of bile gastritis, or attend a conference where they discuss a patient with a rare fungal infection. The amount of new information you will learn in these first few months will truly be astounding. But how is what you learned going to be available to you 8 months from now when you see the second patient with the same unusual infection? How are you going to be able to review what you have learned when January rolls around and its time for your in-training exam? At the end of your residency, will you be ready to take the boards?

There is no right or wrong way to create a system for studying clinical medicine, but there are a few principles that will help.

1.  Record what you learn as you learn it. 

There’s no way around it. If you really want to learn clinical medicine, you have to make notes. Until there is a good digital solution, start by going to work every day with blank 3×5 cards in your pocket. When you learn something on rounds, write it down on a card. When you look up something related to a new patient you are working up, write it down on a card. Make it brief, legible and to the point. If there are “hooks” (i.e. the patient had a tattoo of a star on his face) put it on the card. It’s how our brains remember. If there is specific information that identifies the patient, do not lose your cards! (It’s a HIPPA violation). To be safe, it’s better not to put patient names, ID numbers, etc on the card.

There is no way any trainee will see every disease or condition in their specialty, but being comprehensive in your studying will help.  For example, let’s say you admit a patient with dyspnea and an arrhythmia who turns out to have a Morgagni hernia.  This is rare, and it’s not likely you’ll see multiple cases during your training.  You make a card on how the patient presented and another card on what the treatment was.  But then you go to the literature and find a case of man presenting with an acute abdomen from a torsed accessory liver lobe in his Morgagni hernia and another case of an octogenarian who presented with dyspnea and constipation.  You have now created “virtual” patients in your mind that add to your pattern recognition. Most importantly, you do it at the time it means something.

One other important thing – don’t ever use scratch paper with plans to copy the notes later.  It just won’t happen. Make the notes once, no matter how bad they look!

2.  Be comprehensive. 

Find a major textbook in your field and write down every topic it covers. (BTW most textbooks are available at the library in electronic form, so you don’t have to actually buy the book) Make it your goal to cover the textbook in a year. Come up with a system to monitor your progress. This is the time to pull out your “Type A” personality to your advantage! Make a spreadsheet and check off topics as you study them and make notes for later review. But – don’t read the chapters in the order of the table of contents. If you are on call tonight and see a patient with pneumonia, read the chapter on pneumonia tonight. If you have time to make notes, great. If not, make your study cards from the chapter tomorrow. The idea here is to read each chapter once and make notes that are complete enough for your review so you never have to go back to the chapter again to study.

Alternates to the 3×5 card system

  1. Use 8×11 pieces of paper to record what you learn. Fold them up in your white coat pocket. Scan them with something like Scannable and then save the pdfs in Evernote with key words so you can search for them later. Don’t put more than one topic per page or you will have trouble organizing them to find information later.
  2. Use your phone. We are on the verge of having facile enough (and small enough) handheld digital devices to do this just as well (or better) than my 3×5 card system. The problem is being able to make your notes on the spot because the device isn’t with you. It never works to plan to make the notes later and, as I said above, it never works to copy notes. There are just too many things you’ll be writing down to make this work.  If you figure out a good way to use your phone for this, please let me know!
  3. Use your computer. There’s no reason you couldn’t type 3 lines of what you learned and email it to yourself, add it to Evernote, or save it directly to the cloud. The advantage of cloud storage is that all your notes are available all the time and are searchable. Just remember, most cloud storage like DropBox is not HIPAA compliant!  Don’t put any patient identifiers in the notes if you choose to use the cloud.

3.  Stay curious.

Being excited by what you are learning will always make it easier. “Set up habits that encourage, and don’t squash, your natural curiosity: Look up answers to your questions, not just subjects you are instructed to read about.”

 “The very first step towards success in any occupation is to become interested in it.”

William Osler

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3.  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Learning is iterative. You don’t really know something until you have studied it multiple times over a period of a month or two. Don’t make your notes, file them away and pull them out the week before the in-training exam. Sit down once a week and just glance through them all.  Develop a system that lets you review them 24-48 hours after you make the notes, a week later, a month later, and 3 months later.

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“To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.” William Osler

Starting Internship (I know what you are worried about)

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I sat at the table this week with our new interns and the outgoing chief residents. Listening to our new interns as they asked questions, I realized everyone starting their internship has the same fears, whether or not they express them:  Will I kill or hurt someone?  Will I look stupid?  What if they find out I’m not as smart as everyone else?  Will I get divorced/separated/alienated from my friends?  Will I gain weight?  How am I going to find time to take care of myself?

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What you are feeling is normal. Every doctor who ever started an internship felt exactly the same way.  The best way to manage your (healthy) fear is to have a strategy.   I’ve written in the past about how to succeed as an intern.  But if I were going to condense that advice into three easy rules (for every day except your day off)  it would be these:

1.    Read at least one section from a textbook in your field every day

2.    Learn something (in detail) from at least one patient every day

3.    Do something to take care of yourself every day

 

Read at least one section from a textbook in your field every day.

Your goal for the year should be to read a major textbook in your field cover to cover.  You don’t have to buy the physical book.  It’s fine if it’s on line or downloaded onto your iPad.

Once you have the book, make a list or spreadsheet of all the sections in all the chapters.  For most textbooks, it’s probably going to be a list somewhere between 150 and 200 topics.  When you look at the 48-50 weeks you will be working this year, it works out to basically a topic a day (with some days for review).

The real goal is not just to read these topics, but to really learn them.  So, when you read, don’t just skim.  Read to learn.  That means taking notes – and reviewing them.

Put a chart on the wall with the list and give yourself a gold star when you finish a topic if you have to, but find a way to make sure you cover all the topics (at a steady pace) during the year.

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Learn something (in detail) from at least one patient every day.

It’s really easy, as an intern, to get caught up in the work and forget that you are fundamentally here to learn – not to provide service.  Make it a daily habit to learn in detail about one patient in your care.  It will overlap nicely with your goal to read a complete textbook.  When you admit a patient with pneumonia, read the section (and make notes) on pneumonia and then check it off your list.

One other important point (that none of us like to hear) – You will make mistakes. Be humble, be honest, and learn from your mistakes. The mistakes you make (and maybe more importantly your “near misses”) are absolutely your most valuable teacher.  When you do make a mistake, use it as the topic you will review for the day. You are going to be really upset but be easy on yourself.  Being upset is the mark of someone who cares, but don’t let it escalate beyond a healthy response. Talk to your mentors and senior residents.  They’ve been there.

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Do at least one thing to take care of yourself every day.

This may sound trivial, but it’s not. If you can, try to eat well, get some exercise and be social every day.  At a minimum, though, pick one specific thing you are going to do for yourself and then do it.

Eat well

Get Some Exercise

Be social

The Best of Wellness Rounds 2011

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HAPPY NEW YEAR TO EVERYONE!

Advice for interns

Why I hardly ever drink diet drinks

How to choose your specialty

What to do on your day off

Studying basic sciences – strategies for success

Studying clinical medicine

Getting (and staying) motivated to exercise

How to succeed on clinical rotations

Gifts for medical students and residents

Why I’m spending more time on Twitter

How not to have sore feet after a day in the hospital

Advice for New Interns

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The summer is the time that the roughly 16,000 new doctors in the United States start their residency training. For all new interns, even though it doesn’t feel like it, you are ready!  The first year of medical school gave you the “vocabulary” you needed for this new language. The second year gave you the “grammar.” Your rotations in the clinics taught you the “language”.  Now you get to actually use it every day!

This year will be one of the most profound transitions you will ever make…. and it will also be a year of intense and fabulous memories. Take some time to write down the stories, or take some photos (but not of patients unless you have their permission!). These notes and images will be precious memories in the future.

In talking to other physicians and thinking about my own experiences, here are a few words of advice for you as you start your internship:

Learn from every patient.

As an intern, you will need to know a lot of detailed information on your patients. You’ll need to use a system to keep track of all this information so that when you are asked, you know the last potassium level, which antibiotics were ordered and what the ID consultant said. If you have a system you developed as a 4th year medical student, great! If not, start with 3×5 cards. Keep one card per patient, clipped together or held together with a metal ring. In the era of the EMR, much of the information you need can be easily accessed… but not really organized the way you need it. If you have developed a good system that doesn’t require physical cards, please send me a message so I can see it!

That covers the information, but not the learning. Learning is something that should be actively integrated into your day, not something you do at night when you are falling asleep. Work on a system that lets you record what you are learning during your daily tasks in a way you can review later. 3×5 cards are a simple, cheap and very effective system for studying medicine, which I’ve described in a previous post. Make a separate card (or use the back of your rounding card) to list something (anything) you learned from every patient you see. p.s. Don’t lose your cards!!!! (HIPAA violation)

Don’t confuse gathering information with studying information. Taking notes is a critical part of learning. Don’t just store chapters and articles in your Google drive… summarize them to review later by taking notes.

Be the doctor for your patients.

This may sound obvious, but in the everyday world of the hospital, it is really easy as an intern to get lost in the details of patient care… and forget about caring for the patient. Stop every once in a while and remember that you really are their doctor. Take a few deep breaths and put yourself in their shoes for a minute to ask something about their family, hold their hand, or just sit with them for a minute.

It’s very easy to get swept away by the velocity of the work most interns experience and lose the “big picture”. When you are confronted with something you haven’t seen before, push yourself to make a plan before you call your upper level resident or the attending. What if you were really the only doctor around? What would you do? Spend 2 minutes on UpToDate if you have to, but don’t just be a clerical worker – be their doctor.

Part of being a good doctor to your patients is to recognize your own limitations. You should never feel bad about calling someone with more experience, no matter how “dumb” you think the question is.  It’s the right thing to do for the patient.

Be deliberate about learning your field.

From day one, commit to an organized plan of study to cover everything you need to learn in your field. Make a plan to read (and then study to learn) a textbook every year. Make notes that are easy to review, so you don’t have to go back to the textbook to review the material.   Whatever system you use, make it easy to integrate the notes you are making in the hospital (e.g. the 3×5 card on each patient) with your organized study system. Adding articles into the mix is fine – but only after you have mastered the basics. Don’t let reading the latest finding take the place of really learning the material in the textbook.

Be kind and be part of the team.

Hard work is made easier when it’s done with your friends. You will all be tired, you will all be stressed, but be kind to each other. Staying 5 minutes more to help out a fellow intern is an investment that will help both of you. Look for ways to apply the golden rule of internship:  “Help others the way you would liked to be helped”.

Make your bed.

Do this simple act every morning to remind yourself to take care of yourself. Find time to consciously take care of your emotional, physical and spiritual health. Take good food to the hospital for your nights on call. Find ways to get stress reducing exercise into your weekly schedule, or at least find ways to increase your activity while you are at work. Watch your weight – if you are losing or gaining, it’s a sign that you need to focus on your own well-being by improving your nutrition and working on your fitness. Nurture your relationships – make your family and friends a priority. Take care of your spiritual needs in whatever way is best for you, but don’t ignore this important aspect of self-care.

Smile!

You have the enormous privilege of caring for other people and learning the art of medicine. Take a little time every day to notice the moments of joy in this work and, if you can, write them down to look at on the days you are tired.

Congratulations to you for all you’ve accomplished thus far!  Enjoy this incredible journey!

Gifts for Medical Students and Residents

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Gift ideas for college graduates who are getting ready to start medical school and medical students getting ready to start their residencies are surprisingly similar.  Medical school and residency are both times of hard work, less free time and increased stress.  The following are gifts that should make life a little easier (and more enjoyable) for medical students and residents:

  • A maid or housecleaning service once a week.  No one in medical school or residency has time to clean (or likes it)!  This will be one of the most appreciated gifts you’ve ever given someone.
  • Along the same lines, a highly functional laptop computer is a critical piece of equipment.  For new medical students, the laptop they had in college is probably not going to be enough.  For residents, if it has been several years since their last computer, an upgrade will make studying and research easier.  To avoid getting the wrong computer, a hand-made certificate that you will pay for the computer of their choice may be a better idea (to make sure they have a computer that really meets their needs.)
  • A year’s subscription to EverNote premium (to allow them to store notes on a cloud server)
  • If they are avid readers (of non-medical works), consider a Kindle, Nook, or other electronic reader.  (If you are considering an iPad, it can be used as a reader, so this might be redundant).  These devices can easily go into a backpack or call bag and make it easy to take 5-minute breaks from studying or work.
  • A really good alarm clock.
  • Membership to a gym for a year.  Working out is important both for physical and mental health during medical training.  But – unless you know which gym is the closest to where they live (or most used by their friends), it might be better to create a homemade “gift certificate” and let them decide.
  • Anything to help promote more exercise.  A bicycle to commute to school or the hospital?  A gift box with exercise equipment?  Yoga classes?
  • An iPod nano or other mp3 player to listen to music while studying   Electronic speakers for their computer will also help provide music while studying.
  • A subscription to Pandora One to create and listen to internet radio stations without commercials.
  • A gift certificate to Whole Foods (or any grocery store that makes take out food), or a healthy prepared food service.  In Houston, we have My Fit Foods, Snap Kitchen, Diet Gourmet, Real Meals 365 and several other services.  These types of businesses exist in almost every major city and can be easily found with an internet search.
  • If you are going to buy a watch to celebrate graduation, don’t make it an expensive watch.  No one wears them in the hospital for fear of losing them (they have to be removed when procedures are done).  It also is inappropriate when caring for patients who may not have many resources.  Ditto for expensive pens.
  • A digital camera or small digital video camera.
  • Anything to support a hobby that they enjoy (but will have to work to keep up during their training)
  • A couple of comments about what not to buy.  Don’t buy stethoscopes, otoscopes or any other medical equipment (unless you are a physician yourself… and even then it’s probably not a good idea).  Don’t buy anything for an office (they won’t have one for a long time) and – absolutely – don’t buy a “black bag” (no one uses them anymore).

How to Study During Your Residency

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The study habits you set during your residency will be the foundation for the rest of your professional life.  Even though that sounds really melodramatic, it’s not.  If you don’t want to end up one of the “stupid” doctors, you’ll need to keep learning.  Medicine changes so dramatically that it is critical to stay on top of things.  Sounds easy, but it is amazing how few doctors develop a disciplined practice of being able to read and study.

Residency, despite what it may feel like some days, is the time that you are learning, and hopefully mastering, your specific profession.  All residents have an annual examination called the “in-service training exam”. It’s a nice marker of how you are doing when compared to the other residents in your field, and it’s motivation to stay on top of the didactic part of your education.   It is easy, like in medical school to try to “cram” for this test in a few weeks, but that’s really stupid.  The test is supposed to motivate you to learn, not to cram.  That being said, how you do on this exam is important, so you will want to review in the few weeks before the exam.  Your in-service score is predictive of how well you will do on your board exam and may be considered by programs if you end up applying to subspecialty fellowships.

So, what is the best way to learn your field and, as a secondary benefit, do well on the in-service exam?  How do you stay on top of the reading, and learn what you need to know?  Just like exercise, it’s far more important to be consistent than intense.  You can’t train for a marathon by running 15 miles once a month… and you can’t learn your field by “cramming” before the exams.  One way to do this is to set up a “training” program for your reading:

Buy the textbook in your field.  For many fields, there is more than one major textbook.  If that’s the case, ask around to see which one is considered the “best” (it will be subjective, but you have to start somewhere!).   If the textbook is on line at the medical school’s library you don’t have to actually buy the book, but you will miss out on the highlighting!  If there is more than one good textbook, plan to read a different one next year.

Map out the year into 46 week “blocks” (3 off for vacation, 1 off for the winter holidays and 4 off to review for the inservice exam).  Divide the textbook into 46 sections and assign the sections to the blocks.  Since I’m a surgeon, I’ll use an example from one of our major textbooks:

  • July 1:  Chapter 1 – Systemic response to injury and metabolic support and Chapter 35 – Soft tissue Sarcomas
  • July 8: Chapter 118 – Chest wall, lung, mediastinum and pleura
  • July 15: Chapter 6  – Trauma
  • Etc
  • Etc

Most textbooks front load with the basic science chapters (which are a little dry compared to the clinical chapters).  I don’t recommend you try to do the textbook in order or you will drown in the basic sciences (and forget why the field is fun!).

Make the textbook portable? If you are reading on line this may not apply.  If not, print out the chapter you are studying for the week from the online source or make a copy of the chapter from the book.  You may have to spend 5 or 10 minutes here or there getting through the chapter – being able to keep it folded up in your white coat pocket helps!

Read ahead and be flexible. If in the 2nd week of your study program you get a patient with breast cancer (for example), go ahead and read the chapter on breast.  It will be much more meaningful if you are applying it to a specific patient which means you are much more likely to learn the information.  Double up the chapters for that week if you can, swap if you can’t – but don’t lose track of the “training grid” (i.e. make sure you read enough to finish the textbook)

Use the SQ3R method when you are reading.  This is a great technique for actually learning what you read, rather than having it go in one ear and out the other (so to speak).

  • Survey – Look through the chapter at the section titles, graphs and tables.
  • Question – Go through a second time (again pretty superficially) but this time create questions that are likely to be answered in the chapter and write them down (this part is actually important, so take the time to write them down!).  For example, on a chapter about appendicitis, the questions would be something like:   What causes appendicitis?  What is the most accurate diagnostic test?  Is there an advantage to laparoscopic over open appendectomy? Etc etc
  • Read – Read with intention to answer the questions you generated and make notes for later review.  Take the time to actually write the answers to the questions you generated.
  • Review – Look over the notes you made and questions you answered.  Force yourself to list the key concepts to tease them out of the details.  Think about what questions you might ask on an exam on the topic.   Most importantly – you should review the material the next day (<5 minutes), a few days after that, and then a month later.  Set up a schedule and a method to make sure you keep track of this review.  Of all the steps that lead to really learning the material, this is probably the most important!
  • Recite – This is the one that seems stupid to most people, but it’s not.  Based on what is known about learning, reciting the things you really want to remember (out loud, not in your head) every time you review the material really helps with retention.  (Thank goodness for call rooms!)

Make notes so that you never have to go back to the book to review.   Use whatever system works best for you.  If you use the 3×5 card note system it will integrate with the other notes you are taking in the hospital.

There are other systems to make notes that work, too – so find the one that works best for you and then use it!  Some people type their final review notes in Word, Evernote or OneNote so they can search their notes.  Another unique way to make notes that are easier to remember is to use Mindmapping . Mindmeister and Xmind are on line for making these kind of notes, if this is what works best for you.

Organize your system for review. Your goal should be to read something every day and to complete the week’s reading every week.  In addition, you need to have a rotating system of review to make sure you look at your notes a day or two after you make them, a week later and a month later (at a minimum).  The more you review the more you retain, so build in as much review as you can.

Creating Your “Peripheral Brain”

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My last post was about how to keep track of the information you are learning on different services.  http://wellnessrounds.org/learning-clinical-medicine-tips-for-the-hospital-and-clinic/

A related, but slightly different issue is the best way to create a “peripheral brain” for your clinical work.  Every medical student and resident creates their own “peripheral brain” to access reference material that they use on a regular basis.  In it’s simplest form, it can be a list of phone numbers for the rotation, faculty dictation numbers, etc.  In a more advanced form, it can include normograms for drug dosing, tables for probability of survival in the ICU,  lists of attending preferences for patient care, etc.

The internet has become a vast  “peripheral brain” for everyone in medicine.  We all use it to find information.   But it’s not ideal because it’s not specific for your needs.  For reference material you need over and over,  it’s more effecient to have it with you.   Unlike the system I described for studying (which is based on 3×5 cards), your peripheral brain should be digital.  My current recommendation for students and residents is to use Evernote.

In a nutshell, here’s how Evernote works:

1.  It’s free. (You can pay $5/month for the Premium version to have your data encrypted and to increase your storage, but you probably won’t need it)

2.  You create “notes” that are stored on a server by Evernote in your account.

3.  “Notes” on Evernote are more than just notes you type – they can also be photos you take, voice recordings, websites, clippings from websites or articles (tables, graphs, normograms, etc), pdfs, scanned images or text.. you get the idea.  Anything that can be stored digitally is a “note” in Evernote.

3.  You can access your notes on any computer, on your desktop (i.e. separate from the internet) and on your smart phone.

4.  You can search your notes.  This is by far the most amazing part of Evernote.  In essence it converts your notes to your own personal “Google”.  Evernote has text recognition for photos which really increases your ability to search.  For example, if you take a picture of a business card, you can search for it by any word that is on the card.

One big caveat.  Do NOT put any information about patients on Evernote.  Even if you pay for the encrypted version, it does not meet HIPPA requirements and you are breaking the law.

Here’s some links to more information about using Evernote:

http://academiclifeinem.blogspot.com/2010/02/evernote-redefining-my-organizational.html

http://computersoftware.suite101.com/article.cfm/why-evernote-is-made-for-medical-students

http://www.healthline.com/blogs/medical_devices/2008/09/evernote-for-doctors-revisited-privacy.html

http://efficientmd.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-doctors-can-use-evernote-as.html

http://www.screencast.com/users/rmacdona/folders/Default/media/63f89060-271d-405e-a544-d463ee267a2c