Kochar's Clinical Medicine for Students


Product Description
Thoroughly revised for its Fifth Edition, this concise textbook is ideal for medical students in internal medicine clinical clerkships. This edition's content reflects current guidelines from the Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine and the National Board of Medical Examiners on topics necessary for this rotation. The book is a collaboration between clinical faculty at the Medical College of Wisconsin and clerkship students who have reviewed all chapters for relevance to the clerkship experience.Kochar's Clinical Medicine for Students Review
This book is probably the best resource available for the medicine clerkship. It is concise and well written. It is divided up into three sections. The first is a discussion of 26 of the most common presentations that beautifully illustrates how to put together your differential diagnosis. This first section I found was extremely helpful when seeing patients on wards or in clinic for the first time. It helped me ask the right questions to patients in order to come of with the most likely diagnoses. It is also remarkably helpful for the shelf exam since maybe 40% of the vignettes deal with these presentations. The second section discusses specific diseases in more detail. Again, these are very well written, with many helpful tables. Nearly every chapter has flowcharts for the management of patients with that particular disease. Since there are many "best next step" questions on the shelf exam, this is very helpful. The last section discusses common topics in ambulatory medicine, such as low back pain, dyslipidemias, and screening and prevention topics. This is very helpful as well since there are always a handful of questions on screening and prevention. Online, there are 34 additional chapters, most of which are useful enough (i.e. likely to appear on the shelf exam) for you to read. There are also a few videos, EKGs and CXRs with explanations of significant findings.As you can see, there is a ton of stuff this book offers, but really none of it is beyond the scope of what could appear on the shelf exam. Except for the few chapters on psychiatric issues, this book was clearly written to help students like myself not just pass, but ace, the shelf exam. And it excels.
I preferred this book to Step-Up to Medicine (Step-Up Series), the most popular choice for medicine clerkship. Obviously people love that book, but I found the outline format too bothersome and prefer prose when delving into a topic for the first time. Step Up's information on diagnosing and managing conditions could use some work as well. For example, under the "diagnosis" section of many diseases, it would give a laundry list of findings for every diagnostic method under the sun without stating the test of choice. Very annoying.
Another popular book is Internal Medicine Essentials for Clerkship Students 2. This is from the ACP and is definitely the most authoritative book written for clerkship students. The problem is that it only covers the bare essentials. I actually did read a few chapters and found them to be a quick recap after already learning of the topic in hand. If you wanted to use this, I would recommend reading the appropriate chapters after having read the material in another book like Kochar's.
I read most but not all of the material in this book (I didn't find out about this book until a few weeks into the clerkship). I also did MKSAP For Students 4 (MKSAP for Students,Alguire) and got through maybe half of the internal medicine questions on USMLEWORLD. I just took the shelf exam today and felt like I was well prepared for it and would recommend this book and the mentioned question banks to anyone who wanted to do well on this clerkship.
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