Books for Surgery

[turkeyjerky]

I understand that the PreTest Surgery qbook is harder than the actual shelf (as pointed out here several times).

But I'm ok with that, as long as the content is relevant. So my question is: Did you all feel that the content of PreTest was on target, or too detailed, not detailed enough???

I like PreTest b/c it provides a high volume of questions, sectioned by topics. This allows you to focus your studying . .. . so for instance, if I feel I'm week on trauma, I can read up about it in the Kaplan notes, then go to PreTest to answer questions in the trauma section. Did anybody take this approach? Thoughts/comments???

No, the content in pretest is absolutely not relevant. That's why it sucks so much.

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[beyondbethany]

Is the NMS casebook people are talking about the one from 2002? Trying to find it on Amazon but don't wanna buy the wrong one!

Yes, the new edition is coming out very soon - within the next month I believe, which was still too late for my rotation. There is a little outdated info in the 2002 ed, but it is still a great book.

I understand that the PreTest Surgery qbook is harder than the actual shelf (as pointed out here several times).

But I'm ok with that, as long as the content is relevant. So my question is: Did you all feel that the content of PreTest was on target, or too detailed, not detailed enough???

I like PreTest b/c it provides a high volume of questions, sectioned by topics. This allows you to focus your studying . .. . so for instance, if I feel I'm week on trauma, I can read up about it in the Kaplan notes, then go to PreTest to answer questions in the trauma section. Did anybody take this approach? Thoughts/comments???

I used PreTest to prepare for the shelf and I thought it was a pretty decent learning tool however, it is a poor reflection of the shelf content. The question structure is pretty different. The shelf has really long question stems that tend to ask more broad questions - diagnosis, next management step. PreTest has a lot of questions with short question stems that ask you to pick the correct answer out of a list of minutiae. It can be really frustrating to use for this reason. I still think it can be a helpful learning tool that sharpens your understanding, but don't use it thinking you are getting a preview of what the shelf looks like.