One of the biggest challenges in medical school and when learning medicine is how vast the amount of information you need to cover is. This is probably most obvious when planning for sitting medical school finals.
To pass final exams, graduate from medical school and be prepared to practice as a doctor in any given environment, you need an incredibly broad knowledge. There is no point in knowing the intricate details of the direct and indirect neurotransmitter basal ganglia pathways if you don’t know the common dermatological rashes you will see every day. Learn the vital and essential 20% of information that will allow you to answer 80% of exam questions and manage 80% of patients across all specialities before you focus on becoming an expert in a specific area. This is what finals will test you on for the most part, not the conditions that would be referred to tertiary treatment centres and the topics researched by academic specialists.
By focusing to ensure you cover the basics across all topics, you can eliminate any weaknesses that might lose you points, boost your exam results and ultimately be a better doctor.
The other benefit to casting a broad net is that you gain knowledge and understanding that will have a knock-on effect to aid your understanding of a different topic. Often, if you get stuck trying to understand a topic, reading about a completely different topic can bridge certain gaps in your memory map that will allow you to come back to the original problem and finally understand it.
Don’t misinterpret casting your knowledge wide as having vague knowledge. It is essential to know the details and the facts. You need to be able to recall at will all of the key details. The trick is to establish which facts are essential and which are supplementary. As a general rule of thumb, essential facts are those that will influence your ability to understand, diagnose, treat and manage a patient’s condition. The more common the condition, the more detail you need to commit to memory. It is also important to memorise the key facts involved in the particular exam you are sitting. The best way to find these out is by doing past papers or practice papers and establishing the type of questions asked and the type of details commonly tested.
One example to illustrate this is to do with cardiology. You need to know every detail about cardiovascular disease. This is because it is one of the biggest causes of death in the Western World, and you will see it every day as a doctor. You need to be able to list everything from the modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors, the treatments for these, the tests with their biochemical values, and the treatments for the complications of acute coronary syndrome.
On the flip side, you don’t need to know every detail and treatment protocol for something like long QT syndrome. You need to know it exists and be able to give some simple and basic details, but you will rarely see it in real life, and when you do, you will request a specialist cardiology opinion.