Preparing for the ABIM exam: Internist's Candidate Perspective (Part II)

For full disclosure, I certainly am an average tester. My test career peaked at my SAT in high school, and my percentile series on subsequent standardized tests decreased in the opposite way with my rise in the medical hierarchy. By the time I got to sustainability, I was, much to the chagrin of my backup director, pleased to be the average Joe.

My program director was an old school boy you saw in one of these sultry places such as Hopkins or MGH. In every hospital, there is someone like him on the staff of internal medicine. He has a mad scientist, shocking white hair, Benjamin Franklin's bifocals, serious behavior and quotes the New England Journal of Medicine as easily as a priest quotes the Bible. In our hospital, he was renamed to his diagnostic insight and warm bedside - it is not surprising that the rest of the doctors in the hospital sent him their families.

Unfortunately, he was also my clinical visit, which meant that once or twice a week I spent the day when he became pimping and was learning all the skills of the physical exam, which I neglected to take to medical school.

Well, you can imagine how the conversation went after he reviewed my learning outcomes on-the-job as an intern. In the same year, I scored the 26th percentile for general internal medicine - the same subject to which my program director / clinical visit to Spanish 6-12 hours each week, I was personally baked. This is definitely not a good start to a career in medicine.

But there is a silver lining to this story of grief. You see, with experience, energy and a healthy dose of fear, my grades in the entrance exam increased with each year of study (which is very important for the program director). It still didn’t help my mom, but internal medicine combined with fierce monthly research has allowed me extremely ABIM test head up and my dignity untouched.

I tell you not to talk about yourself, but to tell you that with some effort you can also go ABIM Exam ,

As is usually the case, I went to the Amazonian book-selling drink in early July, 6 weeks before the date of the exam in mid-August. However, it was money that could be spent on more useful things — for example, on a set of great Apple products — because even with a month of preparation, I only had time to answer questions from MKSAP 15 and see the concepts from basics of advice 2, ABIM “Board Review,” published by the American College of Physicians, akin to First Aid.

Even after training in the field of internal medicine, the prospect of revising all organ systems in one month is a difficult task. In the end, according to the ACP, we must be specialists in cardiology, dermatology, gastroenterology and hepatology, hematology and oncology, general internal medicine, neurology, infectious diseases, rheumatology, nephrology, pulmonary and critical medicine, and endocrinology and metabolism. In fact, I don’t think I can even tell a case sentence without losing breath.

I started with dermatology, the shortest and, therefore, (in my opinion) easy section. I was studying cardiology for the second, considering that it was one of my weaker subjects, and from there I systematically continued through the rest of the questionnaires one by one ...