hi my name is max feinstein and i'm an anesthesia resident at the mount sinai
hospital in new york city. in this video i'm going to be walking you
through all of the study resources that i recommend for anesthesiology
starting at the third year of medical school and going all the way through where i am right now,
which is PGY3 [post-graduate year 3] or CA2 [categorical anesthesiology 2]
if you find this video interesting or helpful i'd really appreciate it if you liked it and
subscribed to the channel. before we dive in why don't we make things a little more academic around
here? how about, like, a degree! yeah, like that. and also maybe a.. turtleneck sweater? and also
some.. glasses? maybe not the glasses, i really can't see out of those. alright let's dive in
before we talk about specific study resources i thought it'd be helpful to just review
what it is that i use to take notes and also to study. since i started taking my first pre-med
classes about 10 years ago, i've gone through a lot of different note-taking styles and systems
and what i've got now works best for me, and you'll figure out what works best for you
so what i like to use is a pretty simple system where i take notes into an excel spreadsheet and
update this as often as every day. a really important part about an effective note-taking
system is making sure that it's easily accessible and so i like to use google docs because that way
i can access it from a computer at the hospital, a computer at home, or my phone if i'm on the go. to
that end i'd recommend another note-taking system to make it very easy to take notes while you're in
the operating room, which is just a piece of paper and a pen, then at the end of the day, anything
i've written down on the sheet of paper i've got with me goes into my excel spreadsheet, which
then goes into my favorite study system which is anki. or anki? anyways, anki is free to download
for a computer, and also has a web-based interface that's free, and then for a small fee you can get
the anki app which makes it super easy to study pretty much anywhere you are. all the content from
my anki flashcards come from this spreadsheet where i keep all of the notes that i've been
taking across the resources that i've been using. one of the big challenges of being a medical
student and rotating through anesthesiology is you have a pretty limited amount of time
that you can spend learning about what you're looking at and then putting it into practice, so
for that reason i would recommend reading select chapters from one of the main anesthesia textbooks
i've tried several different textbooks and the one that i personally prefer is by morgan and mikhail,
and at the time of recording this video the latest edition is the sixth edition. independent of
whichever version you're using, the chapters that i'd recommend are the ones that i think will help
build a strong foundation in anesthesiology in a relatively short period of time.
those chapters are on the anesthesia workstation, cardiovascular monitoring,
non-cardiovascular monitoring, and then the chapters on airway management,
cardiovascular physiology and anesthesia, and finally respiratory physiology and anesthesia
if you have time, looking at other relevant chapters in this book would also be extremely
helpful but i would start with those. the other resource that covers a lot of high-yield topics
in a short period of time is a series of videos put out on youtube by the university
of kentucky's anesthesiology department. most of these videos are anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes.
one of the nice little perks about the university of kentucky videos is that they slip in little
motivational quotes or photos at the ends of a lot of the videos. i've never personally met
dr shnell, for example, but he always seems to be up to some fun travel adventure somewhere
then of course the main resource for learning as a third and fourth year
medical student is simply in the operating room, so make sure that when appropriate,
you're asking your resident or your attending questions about the cases that you're seeing
okay so for your intern year it's absolutely crucial that you have read,
cover to cover, Yao and Artusio, big miller, baby miller, morgan and mikhail, stoellti-- no, no, i'm
just kidding. obviously you pretty much don't have to read anything during your intern year because
your primary goal is to pretty much just survive, and if you're going to read anything at all maybe
read some fiction so that you can have some entertainment in your life. i personally
have read House of God several times, and it's a dark satire but it's pretty
entertaining. i also did spend a lot of time eating pizza, more so than i normally do
if you are going to do any anesthesia reading during intern year,
maybe spend some time skimming through morgan and mikhail or one of the other main anesthesia
textbooks like miller or yao and artusio. but really i would just focus on getting
through your rotations and trying to learn what you can from each one that you're on
as you can imagine, CA-1 year is where the learning curve gets really steep for anesthesia,
particularly at the beginning. the way that i like to conceive of all of CA-1 year is to break
it down into manageable bits. so if you start with the smallest bit that you can have, which is just
everyday learning, pretty much any residency program you go to, the expectation is going to be
that the night before you go in, you have spent time reading about the surgeries that you're
going to provide anesthesia for, reading about your patients, their comorbidities,
and devising an anesthetic plan which you'll then talk about with your attending again the
night before you go in. to that end i would highly recommend a textbook called The Anesthesiologist's
Manual Surgical Procedures by Jaffe, which has very concise explanations of what you can expect
in terms of both anesthetic management and also surgical issues that may come up during
many types of procedures. this book is super helpful not just because it goes through the
foundational components of an anesthetic plan like induction, maintenance, and emergence, but it also
addresses things like fluid resuscitation and expected blood loss during a case
the other textbook i'd highly recommend for daily use is Stoelting's Anesthesia and Coexisting
Disease which has very concise but thorough reviews of many of the common comorbidities that
your patients will have and what the anesthetic implications of those comorbidities are.
one of the other resources that i found extremely helpful, especially during the
beginning of CA-1 year, was just bringing in a piece of paper and a pen to write down
everything that i was learning that i didn't know while i'm in the operating room,
and so i just combined that with my daily prep sheet where i write out my anesthetic plan
and basic information about all of my patients. that sheet looks just like this,
where on one side i've got my anesthesia plan information, and then on the other side i just
have lines where i can write notes that i'm taking throughout the day. once i get home i
enter those notes into my excel spreadsheet and anki deck, and then try and study them regularly
the other resource that i'd recommend to supplement daily learning is an excellent free
website called OpenAnesthesia.org where there's an encyclopedia of many different concepts in
anesthesiology, and also a focus on in-training exam keywords. most of the pages on OpenAnesthesia
are pretty concise so it makes it a great resource if you're limited on time and need to just get the
most salient facts about the topic you're looking up. i should just mention that if you are going
to take any notes on your phone while you're at the hospital, that you make that abundantly
clear to your senior resident or your attending so they don't think that you're just sitting there
playing candy crush or something. although that does beg the question of whether playing candy
crush counts as studying for anesthesia? i'm just kidding, i don't play candy crush
now to zoom out a little bit and think about your CA-1 year in terms of rotations,
which at many residency programs are going to be in four week or one month blocks.
my recommendation for studying for each rotation is that once you're about to start a new rotation,
then you go and read the relevant chapters in Morgan and Mikhail or
whichever main textbook you're using. i'd also recommend supplementing that
learning with the relevant videos from the university of kentucky's series on youtube
another excellent resource for preparing for each one of your rotations is going
through the relevant questions in the TrueLearn question bank. TrueLearn makes it really easy
to pick out questions that are relevant to your specific rotation, for example
pain management or obstetrics or pediatrics. this is a great segue into where i think
TrueLearn really excels, which is preparing for the in-training exam that we take every year,
and where it really starts to count which is during CA-1 year. now this video is actually
sponsored by TrueLearn, which A) is amazing and B) i just want to point out that i would only
ever accept a sponsorship from a company whose product i personally use and strongly recommend,
and TrueLearn is definitely one of those products. i'll just use this opportunity to briefly remind
you of the fact that i don't hesitate to share my honest opinion about any product that makes
its way into my videos... "i'm not sponsored by Naked, but if i were, i would say something like
'Naked juice: an overpriced and mediocre drink for the middle of the day'"
anyways i think TrueLearn is pretty much the gold standard of question banks for
anesthesiology, and a lot of other different specialties as well. and i'm not the only one
who thinks that-- in fact, in my own residency program, we have required TrueLearn modules
as part of our learning for many of the rotations that we go through as residents.
as i'm sure you're already aware, it's really important to be taking your practice tests in
a format that is very similar to the actual test that you take, and that's one of the reasons why
TrueLearn is really helpful, because the tests that you take look just like the in-training exam
or the basic exam that you'll eventually take at the end of CA-1 year or beginning of CA-2
when i've used TrueLearn to prepare for my in-training exams, i use it in a timed mode
that really makes it feel just like taking the actual test where i have a very limited amount
of time to get through each one of the questions, and i don't get to see any of the explanations
until i've taken the entire test. if i'm not cramming for a test, i turn the pressure down
a couple of notches and use the tutor mode which doesn't time me and allows me to see the answer
explanations after each one of the questions that i go through. importantly, TrueLearn also includes
very thorough explanations of all of the right and wrong answers as you go through each one of the
tests. in my personal experience after having taken three in-training exams at this point,
and also the basic exam (which i did pass, by the way) i can say that the content that shows
up in TrueLearn questions is really directed at the kind of material that shows up on exams,
so you can bet that a lot of the answer explanations, particularly for the questions
that i got wrong, end up in the spreadsheet that i use to study on a regular basis
as you're preparing to take the first part of your board exams, which is the basic exam, i
would recommend not only going through the entire TrueLearn question bank but also going through all
the questions that you've gotten wrong so that you can make sure that you have an understanding
of the material that tripped you up the first time. if you don't already have TrueLearn,
i'd highly recommend getting it, and you can get 25% off using the discount code DrFeinstein
the other resource that i'd recommend to supplement your preparation for the
in-training exam and the basic exam is a podcast called ACCRAC by Jed Wolpaw,
the program director at johns hopkins. this is a very easy to listen to podcast and he
covers a range of topics including a lot of podcasts on the in-training exam keywords
as for CA-2 year, i use all the same resources that i did for CA-1.
and for CA-3 and above, well i'm not a CA-3 so i don't know, but stay tuned for future videos
some honorable mentions for other resources include the miller textbook which i did
start using but ultimately didn't find in my liking, so i switched to Morgan and Mikhail.
also the Yao and Artusio textbook, which i haven't looked at but i've heard good things from other
people. and then the Stanford CA-1 guide which some people have found to be a useful resource
towards the beginning of residency. the last resource i'd recommend is my own videos,
because i've spent a lot of time making videos, for example like this one on how
to do epidurals, spinals, and combined spinal epidurals. i hope you found this
video interesting and helpful, thanks very much for watching! i'll see you next time