How to Boost your USMLE Score and Lower Health Care Costs

Episode 89: Tips for saving money in health care. And, calling all 2nd year medical students! It’s your time for a USMLE score boost!

Download transcript: How to boost your USMLE Step 1 score and save health care costs

The Dark Side of Medicine

Today I’m going to be talking about the unveiling of the dark side of the medical-industrial complex and how the institutions and boards that run the hospital systems can often times have a different agenda than you the physician, the one charged with taking care of the patient.

Calling All Second Year Medical Students

Before we get into the meat of that discussion today I want to put a call out to all second year medical students.  I have an IRB proposal that I’m putting together for a research project.  This about the fifth one I’ve done now on medical students or pre-meds or residents and such.  This one is specifically looking at mood states prior to taking the USMLE Step 1 or the COMLEX Part 1 if you go to an osteopathic medical school.   Then I’ll do a mastermind intervention and re-survey students to see if their mood states change.

[ad#300×250]

If you happen to be a second year medical student you could benefit be participating in the intervention.  Of course we’ll do official informed consent and all that stuff to tell you what’s expected and what you get out of it.  The bottom line is I want to survey some students about 40 questions.  How long does that take you, a couple minutes at the most then give you a three week, twice a week teleconference style delivered mastermind meetings to boost your USMLE study plan, to decrease your anxiety and help you get better organizational skills.  I don’t need to go into all the details here, but if you will visit medicalschoolpodcast.com, sign up for the email list.

That will instantly send you some speed reading videos, but that’s beside the point, just get on the email list because very soon I act fast, I’m telling you.  I’ve written most of the IRB proposal today with some spare time.  I am going crazy with research.  I’ve got all kinds of stuff going.  I’m about to have a gig in Philadelphia at a sleep conference.  I’m going to have a paid trip to Berlin to speak on military research that we’ve been doing here.  Everything I’ve touched is turning to gold in the research department and I would like to bring you in along for the ride and I hope that you’re enjoying the podcast.

Perhaps you’ve noticed I have a different little swing in my step, a little bit more boost of energy and reinvigoration of the medical school podcast.  That’s in large part due to getting my medical license and having the horror and black smudge of pain in my life from my previous emergency medicine residency experience wiped away with my medical license and it also has to do with being finished with my current residencies, nights and weekend call.  It’s just done.  I have a day job now (laughs).

Physician Ethics

Today the idea is that you start out in medicine, you take a Hippocratic Oath, you put on the white coat, you’re here for the patient first.  Many times you hear the term medico-legal, you hear ethical, you hear law and ethics often times combined as topics for presentations.  You’ve been beaten to death with this stuff like patient autonomy, justice, beneficence, non-maleficence, first do no harm.  Of course you have law and often times laws can be unethical.  I don’t even need to get into that here.  As a healthcare professional, specifically as a physician you have one bent, to take care of the patient, that’s my point.

Today I wanted to highlight a problem.  Especially as healthcare systems are being squeezed for finances in The Affordable Care Act is crushing smaller practices and hospitals as we have a payer shift to more public ...