Category: Clerkships
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Clerkship Tips: How to Administer a Mental Status Examination
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The Mental Status Exam (MSE) is essential for evaluating psychological functioning in clinical practice. This guide explores its components, significance, and tips for effective implementation in patient assessments, making it a valuable tool for healthcare providers across various specialties.
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USMLE® Step 2 Question of the Day: Medication effects
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Delve into a clinical case of a 67-year-old woman with intermittent palpitations and fatigue. Identify potential arrhythmias and the best treatment option for her condition.
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How to Collaborate Effectively with Your Attending: Neurology Edition
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Welcome to your neurology clerkship! Discover key strategies for mastering patient examinations, enhancing clinical skills, and maximizing learning opportunities during this unique rotation.
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Osmosis Product Updates: 2025
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The Osmosis from Elsevier team is dedicated to providing all our learners with an engaging and impactful learning experience. We invite you to check back here regularly to learn about Osmosis product updates and improvements throughout 2025. Now, let’s dive into the latest updates! January 2025: The Retirement of Clinical…
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USMLE® Step 2 Question of the Day: Leg pain
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Get ready for USMLE Step 2 CK with a question focusing on necrotizing soft tissue infections (NSTI). Can you describe and interpret the diagnostic workup for an adult presenting with an NSTI and identify the key diagnostic features that differentiate between NSTI, possible NSTI, and non-NSTI? Enhance your clinical skills…
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USMLE® Step 2 Question of the Day: Serum potassium
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Prepare for your USMLE Step 2 CK with a question focusing on hypokalemia in adults. Can you formulate and prioritize a differential diagnosis for a patient presenting with hypokalemia, and identify the additional tests needed to confirm your diagnoses? Enhance your clinical reasoning skills with this important assessment. A 26-year-old…
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How to Collaborate with Your Psychiatry Attending
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Welcome to your new psychiatry clerkship! To help you thrive during your clinical rotations, we’re sharing practical, hands-on advice from experienced medical professionals to help you make the most of your psychiatry rotation. We’ve compiled a quick psychiatry clerkship guide to help you seamlessly navigate your psychiatry rotation. The Fundamentals of…
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Understanding Substance Use Disorder: A helpful guide for health professionals
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Substance Use Disorder (SUD) is a health condition involving a patient’s uncontrolled use of a substance, such as alcohol, drugs, and medications, that affects an individual’s daily life by impairing their physical and mental health, along with social functioning. There are about 20 million people in the US (approximately 6% of the total…
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A Quick Reference Guide to Male Reproductive Health Disorders
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Despite the importance of reproductive health in relation to overall well-being, many people avoid discussing it due to stigma, cultural norms, fear of judgment, lack of awareness, privacy concerns, and apprehension about medical intervention. Yet several reproductive health conditions significantly impact not only a male patient’s physical health but also…
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Top Ten Health Conditions That Are Easily Misdiagnosed
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An accurate diagnosis is the cornerstone of medicine and the basis for any treatment. Nonetheless, a misdiagnosis can happen to any clinician due to a variety of issues, including overlapping symptoms or referencing an incomplete medical history. Let’s look at a quick case study to consider the challenges and potential…
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How to Impress Your Attending: Obstetrics and Gynecology Edition
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Welcome to your clerkship in obstetrics and gynecology! You’ll find this rotation beneficial no matter your future specialty because you’ll very likely encounter pregnant patients, whether you’re a primary care physician or a surgical subspecialist. Probably the best part of your OB/GYN clerkship is that you’ll gain valuable skills that…
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A Quick Reference Guide to Signs and Symptoms Associated with Diabetes Mellitus
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Introduction You’ve probably heard of diabetes, know someone with diabetes, or have been diagnosed with it yourself, as it’s one of the most common conditions in the United States, with 11% of the population diagnosed, and Singapore (10.5%), Malta (10%), and Portugal (10%) following close behind. Diabetes mellitus, commonly referred…
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How to Impress Your Attending: Internal Medicine Edition
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Internal medicine is a vast specialty covering all major organ systems, common diseases, rare diseases, and everything in between. Not even a seasoned internal medicine specialist can possibly know it all. The excellent news is that most Internal Medicine attendings don’t expect a third-year medical student to know it all.…
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How to Impress Your Attending: Surgery Edition
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Welcome to your new surgery clerkship! To help you thrive during your clinical rotations, we’re sharing practical, hands-on advice from experienced medical professionals to help you make the most of your surgery rotation. Your surgery rotation is unique and exciting in comparison to your other rotations because you get to go…
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Mastering the Match Interview: Expert Tips for Success for Medical Students
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We’re sharing tips with medical students on how to interview successfully after Match Week on today’s Osmosis blog. Learn how to stand out from the competition by asking the right types of questions and carefully honing their interviewing skills. Let’s get started! After meticulously crafting your residency application, it’s time to…
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The Osmosis Ultimate Guide to Thriving in Clinical Rotations
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Clinical rotations are a pivotal time for medical students because they take their first big step toward becoming full-fledged doctors. Your days are filled with long hours, there’s a lot of pressure to perform, and you have to make sure to study for exams like USMLE Step 1®. It’s also…
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Clinical Rotations: Expectations vs Reality
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Most pre-clinical students have a familiar yet foreign idea of how a hospital works. In this blog, Kieren talks through what he expected going into a hospital for the first time and how this matched with what actually happened during his first week. Introduction The ideas and expectations of what…
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Breaking Bad News: Using the SPIKES Protocol vs. the BREAKS Protocol
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Learn how to deliver tough medical news to patients using the SPIKES and BREAKS protocols to enhance communication and create better patient outcomes.
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A Brief Intro to Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PMR) Specialty for Medical Students
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This blog explores the medical specialty of physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R), what exactly it is, and how to become a successful applicant for residency. As I was shadowing a PM&R physician, he wisely pointed out how a single moment in time, such as a car accident or a stroke,…
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How to Impress Your Attendings During Clinical Rotations
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Are you ready to embark upon your third year? It’s a time in a medical student’s life where you go from simulated cases and enter into real life scenarios. Read on to ensure you are prepared to enter the professional world and stand out amongst your peers. I am beyond…
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How to Thrive During Clinical Rotations and Make the Most of Your Time in the Clinic
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The clinical rotations or clerkships phase of your clinical education sets the stage for the rest of your career. In 2020, thousands of medical students entered their clinical rotations in the unprecedented circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. To help them survive and thrive in this new environment, the Osmosis team…
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5 Easily Avoidable Medical Malpractice Cases
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As a doctor, it’s extremely important to stick to procedural guidelines, follow the rules, and keep your patients’ safety top-of-mind. If you don’t, your patients’ health will suffer, and they could even lose their lives. Doctors who cut corners also run the risk of being sued for malpractice, which can…
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How To Choose Your Medical Specialty
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How to choose a medical specialty that’s right for you. Advice from a fourth year medical student. As I’m writing this, I find myself at the end of the process of choosing my specialty…I think. Maybe by the time you have read this post, I’ll have already changed my mind…
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3 Tips to Write Progress Notes
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Introduction As a health professional, knowing how to write a progress note is important. These progress notes are also known as SOAP notes. Why soap? Well, if you’ve written a progress note before, you know that SOAP is a useful shorthand for remembering the four components of note-taking: Now that…