I'm also getting interested in this companion that evidently we don't get this term. Does anyone have a copy lying around I can make a copy of or buy?

You must have taken the course before Dr L took over then... Because I have a friend that the course when it was taught by the companion author and the exam questions weren't as clinically oriented as they are now. They used to ask questions like: "the borders of the femoral triangle include..."

As for how the course is taught now--- the companion is 95% useless. The other 5% usefulness comes from the fact that it had diagrams and some useful bullets with enough room to add your own notes from studying so that you could refer to it instead of pulling out your 1000 pages of slides.

99.9% of our questions came from BRS style questions that were a little less difficult than BRS.

know your structures because for the practical you have 25 structures to label, and the virtual has 25 structures to label. Essentially these are 50 FREE points...

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St. George's University
School of Medicine
Class of 2012

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What's the difference between the practical and virtual? For practical do you actually need to go the the lab and look at a real cadaver?

The practical is a 25 minute bellringer with 1 tag/cadaver, multiple choice. The structures are all very obvious (ie the median nerve might be tagged, and the options will be things like radial nerve, radial artery, median nerve, ulnar nerve, and axillary nerve) and you can see everything relevant to the structure and around it (ie, the entire arm will be shown) - they don't try to fool you. It generally happens an hour or 2 after the written exam.

The slides are shown for the first 25 minutes of the written exam, same as the practical - one tag per slide and no tricks - it's all very obvious stuff.

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Most of what I write is unvalidated hearsay and my own opinion. Just sayin'.

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Oh, no more companions? I found it to be very helpful not as a primary source of information, but as a study guide. Since most of the questions (except for clinical blue boxes) came from companion. I enjoyed coloring and labeling it too...

Thanks. I'm actually comfortable with the functional and clinical aspects of anatomy, but not so much with the structural and identification part. I don't know why they're testing structure - the USMLE doesn't do that.

but in clinicals (surgery) you need to know that!

in medicine too, I remember my first day in the cath lab...getting pimped on the coronary system, all the minor branches as well

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I love mankind; it's people I can't stand...

like i said somewhere else....nothing worse when you cant ID some anatomy...its like the ABC and 123 of medicine...its ok if you dont remember some biochem pathway or pulm physio or renal physio or even some hard path/diseases such as RTA...but if you cant even remember or know common anatomy..that is just bad