First Aid for the Internal Medicine Boards (FIRST AID Specialty Boards)


Product Description
A Complete Review of Every Internal Medicine Topic Included on the ABIM Exam -- written by physicians who passed!
</b>5 STAR DOODY'S REVIEW!
"I wish I had this book when I was studying for my boards. It is well worth the price for both study for the boards and for a quick reference." -- Doody's Review Service
- Insider tips for outstanding performance from residents who've been there
- Complete coverage of every must-know topic in one quick-study resource
- Quick, frequently-tested, high-yield facts based on the most recently administered in-service and board exams
- Board-proven mnemonics and clinical pearls
- NEW 20-page full-color insert of clinical images you must know at exam time
- 55 NEW images and 100 NEW pages of high-yield facts
- Great for recertification
- Perfect for last-minute review
First Aid for the Internal Medicine Boards (FIRST AID Specialty Boards) Review
Compared to other board review resources for the ABIM exam, this book is less expensive. It's fairly exhaustive -- they manage to cover most if not all of the domains listed on the ABIM Blueprint (publically available, Google it if you have to) and even include color plates with nice illustrations -- most are skin findings reproduced from the Fitzpatrick's Color Atlas of Dermatology -- a great book to own just by itself).But the text reads more like a medical student's lecture notes. While exam questions often hinge on your ability to finely differentiate two or more different disease presentations, this book addresses by dozens and dozens of tables. However, it often misses direct comparisons in the text itself, instead listing conditions one-by-one, and always sticking to the structure of "symptoms, exam, differential, diagnosis, treatment"... which would be useful if this were just a reference book. But getting more non-table-based hints to distinguish between differential diagnoses seems like it would be more helpful. The text has trouble drawing the relationships between diseases (other than in tables).
This book also lacks the reviews of other resources -- as seen in other First Aid series books -- perhaps because the last page is a full-page ad for UCSF's own board review course, or maybe because McGraw-Hill is now their publisher, or maybe because it's just logistically difficult to compile such opinions.
MKSAP is 1500 pages of content. First Aid for the Internal Medicine boards is roughly 600+ pages. The ratio corresponds to about 2/5, and for the effort and time you're going to spend reading, I would say you should probably spend those 600 pages of reading on MKSAP or some other equivalent resource, e.g. MedStudy, or moreover, doing actual questions. This book contains not a single practice question -- not that it claims to. Actually, it does have one practice question -- it's a screen shot of the ABIM Demo software for the computer-based exam, with a nice question about co-treatment for Chlamydia (or lack thereof). But this is not a question book.
Most worrisome is that, if you didn't know Medicine, you probably couldn't answer that one sample question on STD's in "First Aid for the Internal Medicine Boards" by using the book itself.
But if you're strapped for time, or on a tight budget (even though you just spent $1000 to register for the ABIM exam), and if you really can't or don't want to wait for the next edition/revision (which is bound to be better), this might possibly be a good book for you.
This is just my opinion, though. Even though this is Amazon, get thee over to Barnes and Noble or your local medical bookstore and flip through the book itself. Far better than reading through these reviews -- the previous two look like they were entered before the book was even published. No one review book is going to fit everyone the same.
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