I’m a medical student currently rotating through clinical clerkships resident attending in emergency medicine. The purpose of this website is to force me to learn. Recently, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to study from review books, and even more difficulty to recall and apply that information practically. What has been working is reading heavily about specific cases I’ve seen. Having a real person in mind, hearing their complaints, doing their examination and then supplementing the experience with targeted reading sticks far better.

As for the format (and title), something that has been hammered into me over the past year is to be systematic in everything I do. The benefits being that I’m less likely to miss stuff if I approach everything the same way. The other benefit for me is that I find these systems to be a better way to learn. Less mnemonics, more flowcharts.

So, I’ll select appropriate cases I encounter (altering identifying information of course), read into it a bit, and create a system for developing the differential diagnosis or aspects of the particular diagnosis.

The site’s going to be a bit rough, the goal is to make it easy to quickly archive these experiences for future reference and learning.