Spoonful of Sugar

Cardiac arrest can be a harrowing phenomenon to witness both within and outside of a hospital. Advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) is a set of clinical guidelines used in managing cardiac arrest. Most residency programs will introduce their trainees to the basics of ACLS, but even as a medical student it is very important to understand the purpose of ACLS and the elements involved in delivering l...

Join us for a review of some commonly seen and commonly tested biliary and pancreatic disorders. MS4 Anisha Reddy navigates through some representative vignettes, making sure to highlight key concepts and clinical pearls throughout the episode. This topic is a staple for your GI content review!

If you have a hard time remembering all the hormones as they pertain to menstruation and pregnancy, this episode is a perfect review for you. MS4 Julie Eggleton hosts this comprehensive overview of reproductive physiology in an engaging, Q&A format.

Anisha Reddy is back to host an enlightening episode on the physiology of bilirubin and many of the related disorders! Do you ever get confused by any of the following? Breast milk vs. breast feeding jaundice? Dubin-Johnson vs. Crigler-Najjar? Primary biliary vs. sclerosing cholangitis? This is your time to clarify and solidify these concepts.

Our newest team member Drashti Patel hosts a brief but comprehensive episode reviewing pleural effusions, a commonly encountered phenomenon in practice and on tests. If you’d like to solidify concepts such as Light’s Criteria for transudative vs. exudative effusions, this episode is made for you!

Sepsis is another bread-and-butter topic in medicine, and it is guaranteed to appear on boards as well in the hospital. Patients with sepsis are sick and have the potential to quickly decompensate, so timely and thorough management is key. In this episode, we’ll review the diagnostic criteria for sepsis and discuss strategies for management of sepsis. Let’s make sepsis less scary so you feel confi...

We are so excited to introduce the Clinical Concepts series! In these episodes, we’re taking our content review up a level so that material is geared more towards clinical rotations and the Step 2 exam. With Clinical Concepts, we’ll focus more on diagnostic and treatment strategies for various disease processes, while integrating basic concepts from Anatomy and Physiology when applicable. Tune int...

Cardiac pathophysiology can be one of the hardest topics to master in medical school. We’re lucky to have MS4 Anisha Reddy help out in this area by reviewing some of the basics of valvular heart disease. We’ll present lots of vignettes, provide some pearls, and cover these diseases the way they are tested on boards.

Prostate Cancer is the most common cancer (that’s not skin cancer) in men. In this episode, MS3 Gary Price reviews the diagnosis, pathophysiology, characteristics, and treatment of prostate cancer. Parts of this review transcend the scope of Step 1, but don’t worry because we’ll be sure to hone in on what’s important for the boards while giving you a comprehensive overview of the topic.

MS3 Tiana DiMasi is back to host an episode reviewing some of the most common neurodegenerative disorders, including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body dementia, vascular dementia, and more. We’ll also cover some common medical conditions that can masquerade as neurodegenerative disorders. Get excited for a thorough review!

Opioids are very important in clinical practice because of their crucial use and frequent abuse. The topic is difficult to understand, but can be easily mastered once conceptually understood. In this episode, MS4 Aditi Kothari provides an overview of opioids, including their mechanisms, uses, adverse effects, and management of abuse. As always, we will ask several questions along the way to reinfo...

Step 1 Season is among us! This episode is meant to provide a little motivation and perspective for anyone who needs it in the days and weeks leading up to the exam.

MS4 Waneeza Mughees is back with an episode on gynecological malignancies! In this episode, we’ll review several topics including molar pregnancies, choriocarcinoma, as well as ovarian, vaginal, vulvar, and breast tumors. We’ll be reviewing questions in a case-based, Q&A format, so get ready to participate!

Future Neurosurgeon & current MS4 Lohit Velagapudi dissects the topic of stroke in an easy, fun, and approachable way. We’ll talk through the pathophysiology of stroke, and then cover commonly tested stroke syndromes based on their location, blood supply, and clinical presentation. This topic is definitely a brainy one, but nothing we can’t handle with a step by step approach and some fun mnemonic...

Placental disorders all sound similar and can be really confusing. In this episode, hosted by MS3 Waneeza Mughees, we will break down placental abruption, placenta accreta, vasa previa, and placenta previa with the high-yield buzzwords for each so you can get these right every time on your exams and in practice!

Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis are relatively common in patients, and they pop up frequently on the boards! There are a lot of specific findings associated with each Crohn’s and UC, and there are also a lot of overlapping findings. The two diseases can be easily confused, and it’s really important to be able to distinguish the two. In this episode, we’ll try to do just that with both silly...

Cirrhosis is such a cool topic (if your definition of cool = highly nerdy) because damage to the liver has systemic effects that involve nearly every organ. In this episode, we’ll review the pathophysiology of cirrhosis and how this relates to physical exam and lab findings, as well as some common complications of cirrhosis that you should be aware of. We won’t cover everything as this is a very b...

Do you remember anything about renal physiology? We hope so! But just in case you’d like a review, in this episode we’ll cover the basics of the nephron in the context of diuretic drug actions. We’ll touch on the mechanisms, adverse effects, and uses of the major classes of diuretic agents. This will be a big picture overview of a quite complex and intricate topic, but hopefully you’ll take away s...

There’s at least 20 different types of vasculitis. We won’t go through all of them, but we’ll definitely hit some of the most common ones which you should be familiar with for the boards and the wards. As always, it’s about having a good mental map to organize the diseases into different classes. We’ll classify vasculitis based on small, medium, and large vessel diseases and try to help ingrain co...

It’s super important to know about the different vitamins and minerals – where they are found, what they do, and what happens if there is deficiency or excess. As we review this topic, you’ll realize how integrated the vitamins and minerals are with all those biochemical pathways we once had to learn. This is a long one, but worth it. Get ready for a fun review!

It’s hard enough to learn the different drugs, but sometimes even harder to understand how all the details from pharmacology class translate to clinical practice. In this episode, we’ll try to pare down all the different classes of anticoagulant and antiplatelet agents in a way that is applicable and easy to remember. Hopefully this episode helps make these challenging drugs seem a little less ove...

Psychoactive drugs and the symptoms associated with intoxication vs. withdrawal can start to blend together. In this episode, hosted by MS3 Tiana DiMasi, we will organize these drugs into categories of major depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens. We will compare and contrast how they work, the symptoms of intoxication and withdrawal, and treatments, so you can keep them straight for test day!

By popular request, here’s an episode reviewing some common benign dermatological conditions. We won’t hit every disease, but we will review some key diseases and concepts that are commonly tested on boards. Feel free to follow along with your review book or Google images to ingrain the images associated with each disease. For a review of malignant dermatology, check out S1E16 on Cancer Epidemiolo...

Final episode of our 3-part series on anemia! Congratulations if you’ve made it this far. In this final episode of our anemia series, we wrap up anemia with the very last category of macrocytic anemia. Often times the best way to remember the “what” is by understanding the “why.” That’s why we try to break down concepts so they make sense and are easy to remember.

Part 2 of a 3-part series. It’s getting long, but bear with us. In this episode, we tackle the second big category of anemia – the normocytic anemias. We’ll try to review each of these diseases the way they are asked on board exams, and then come up with ways to help organize and remember the various types of normocytic anemia.