Dia M3 Guide

Shelf Advice:
-Again I want to reiterate because people drop the ball a lot here. Study every day, even if its 45
minutes, the exceptions are if you come home at like 11pmon a call night, but otherwise every day
study little by little. You will do better on the rotation and better on the shelf, you can't cram for a shelf,
they are broad standardized tests that test your holistic knowledge not what you crammed in a week.

Family Shelf:
The Family med shelf is vague and broad, not very fact heavy at all. A lot of material comes from
step 1 knowledge + 1st step management + preventative medicine. So its hard to say whats the
best way to study or what to use.

Case Files is a great book, a great foundation to family medicine - I read this book several times.
Knew it really well

Step up 2 medicine Ambulatory section is very good - extremely high yield and concise. Just the
ambulatory section not the whole book.
I did pretest questions - 500 - really valuable.
I did not Do Uworld because theres no uWorld family.

(Least high yield resource if you have time) I did the 1400 AAFP questions online. These
questions are meant for residents taking their boards, so like 30% of the questions are beyond
the scope. The rest are pretty good. You have to sign up for membership for free
here: http://www.aafp.org .

Focus on screening guidelines, 1st step management, when to biopsy, when to test for things.
Pharyngitis is big on the test, theres a good amount of basic derm.
In family med you will learn a lot of peds and ob/gyn. but on the shelf there was like maybe 1
peds questions and 1 obgyn question which was baffling. So I would not learn anything outside of
case files for that.

Surgery Shelf:
The surgery shelf is an internal medicine shelf. It will not test you on how to do a procedure or
which suture to use or what technique is best, it is the MEDICAL management of pre-op or post-
op patients and then some trauma questions. Focus your studies on medical management.

Surgery is the hardest shelf to study for because theres no one good resource.
Questions: Uworld are really good for trauma. A lot of people also do some of the IM portion of
uworld since the surgery shelf is almost all medicine.I also used kaplan bank questions for
surgery (if you can afford it).

Books: Theres really no good book out there. I used a mix of books. NMS case series is an
outdated old book that is good to use. Case files surgery is ok. Theres a guy name pestana who
had a 70 page pdf that goes through high yield points thats really good, he recently published a
surgery book that I heard is good.

IM Shelf:
-Do Uworld IM (1400 questions) do them all. Very worth it
-Book: I used Step up to medicine, its a dense book thats not for everyone (akin to rapid review
path), Case filesmedicine is ok, choose what works with you and run with it.
-Make sure you know your next step in management, what to do next after your diagnosis, this is
key.


Psychiatry:
-First AID psychiatry is good
-Uworld Psychiatry and Lange Q&A are really good.

Ob/Gyn:
-Case files is really good
-UWorld Ob/gyn
-uWise questions (free from UIC)

Pediatrics:
-Case files is really good
-UWorld Peds (kaplan is good also if you have money, I didn't like pretest not similar to the test).
-UIC baby handbook (they give it to you) is very amazing, knew it cold.