I know many of you are feeling lost right now. Some might have just started preparing. Some might have lost their rhythm. Some are depressed that they are not scoring well. 

Have you ever thought, why, you are feeling so low? 

Is it because YOU are not giving your best, YOU are running out of time, YOU are falling back on your schedule? 

Or is it the feeling that OTHERS are getting ahead. 

Because these are two different questions. 

Let's talk about them both. 

The book that I highly recommend everyone is SPARK. It's written by Dr. John Ratey who is a psychiatrist at Harvard. The book is about exercise and how it strengthens our mental muscles. Apart from all the physical benefits of exercise, there are many neurological benefits of exercise that even we as medical students and doctors don't know. And no, I am not talking about the endorphin rush that you get after exercise or using exercise as a stress buster. The author has described beautifully, the role of exercise in treating depression, ADHD, and chronic stress. How exercise balances our neurotransmitters. How exercise, with the help of a miracle molecule called Brain-Derived Neurotropic Factor (BDNF), prevents neuronal aging and promotes neuroplasticity which helps to improve our learning and memory. All and all, exercise is a one-stop-shop for almost every mental health issue that we all face during our studies.

In fact, one of the reasons for starting our blog was this book only. It has given us so many insights that we just had to share it with you all. That's why one of the first blogs that we posted was on exercise only back in 2018.

Most of you have been asking us, ways to study Medicine. We will try to cover this topic in different parts. For this episode, my focus is on the undergraduates especially the final year students who are or will attend their clinical postings.

Everyone knows that your patients are your best teachers. No matter how much Harrison you read, if you cannot apply those learning in your practice, it's of no use.  In our interview with Dr. Tanya, she had also mentioned the importance of going to the wards and attending bedside lectures. Those were the things that actually helped her prepare for NEET-PG in such a short time. You can watch that video on our youtube channel.

So, to learn medicine properly, you MUST have good clinical skills. You should learn and practice all the basic examinations of all the systems including the general examination. You should learn to take a proper relevant history. Whenever you are talking to a patient or examining the patient, you must sound confident and make them believe that you know what you are doing to gain their trust.

How do you build that confidence? 

I know, most of you are struggling with pharmacology. Here is my take on how you should study pharma for competitive exams. Studying so many drugs is definitely overwhelming. Almost everyone preparing for exams faces problems memorizing it. I remember that even after revising pharma 5-6 times, I struggled to memorize even the basic classification of different drugs and I am sure you all can relate to it. 

When I was in the final year, our professor told us how a surgeon had amputated the wrong limb of a patient. He didn't care to cross-check where the pathology was and operated the patient in a hurry and as a result, faced negligence charges. He was also barred from the OT.

He told us this because he wanted to teach us the significance of WHO's surgical safety checklist.

The checklist has three parts. Sign in which is before the induction of anesthesia, time-out which is before an incision is made and finally Sign Out.

As the surgeries are getting complex day by day, performing so many steps in the correct order with maximum precision is extremely challenging. Another challenge is to reduce post-op morbidity and mortality as well.

With the adaptation of this Simple checklist, doctors were able to reduce the post-op complications drastically.

The pioneer of this Checklist was Dr. Atul Gawande who is a breast surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. I admire him a lot and in his book The Checklist Manifesto, he has written about the whole process of how this checklist was created, what were his inspirations, what all problems he faced and how can we adapt these simple checklists to organize our cluttered lives.

Today we will talk about a very common problem that you all face while creating flashcards, which is that the process of creating flashcards and then reviewing them takes a lot of time.

Firstly please understand that if you are used to handwriting your notes lets say you watch a video, write your notes, and then move to solve MCQs adding an extra step of also creating flashcards will definitely take time. You cannot skip any step in between. So, how can you cut short your time?