First Aid for the Internal Medicine Boards
A Complete Review of Every Internal Medicine Topic Included on the ABIM Exam — written by physicians who passed! 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 reso…
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Tagged with: Boards • First • Internal • Medicine
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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.
Good overall general review of internal medicine. A little too basic for serious IM board review, however. Would probably be most appropriate for a busy first year resident/intern in internal medicine or family practice. Might even be just right for a bright fourth year medical student aspiring to join the ranks of IM.
I would STRONGLY recommend the Internal Medicine Medstudy books as the backbone of your review prior to taking the ABIM certifying or recertifying exam!!! The Medstudy DVDs compliment the books as well. Worked great for me. Mayo Review and MKSAP are decent, also.
I’ve been using the First Aid for the Internal Medicine Boards to review IM material during my 3rd year, and I would say that it is very complete. It is more concise than other review books out there coming in over just 600 pages and is very much more affordable. Most review books out there cost hundreds of dollars and are just too long to read more than once. First Aid for IM review is organized by disease system and then is broken down signs/symptoms, differential, diagnosis and treatment. There are many pictures for the diseases it covers with color glossies in the back of the book. The book is full of easy to review charts and mnemonics. There are notes in the margins to highlight must memorize facts. The key to using this book is to study the charts which have high yield facts useful for answering questions and also memorizing the algorithms which can be applied to many different types of questions. When combined with the question book of your choice, First Aid for IM boards provides effective review. This book is short enough, as opposed to other review books, that it can be reviewed several times before you take the boards. When do we ever really remember anything when only reading it once? I recommend this book to anyone that wants a complete IM review in the shortest time possible with high yield facts that helps you answer more questions correctly.