Throughout your third and fourth year of medical school you will frequently be told to “read about your patients.” Uptodate.com is one of your best resources for succinct, up to date, and easy to manage medical information. The site contains review articles written by experts in the field and covers nearly all important topics in medicine. Most large hospitals and medical centers have access to the database through their network. There is a useful app too, but you may not be able to access it through wi-fi even within the hospital, due to some site restrictions. But, DON’T PAY for it. More than likely, there is a way to access it through your medical school.
How to Use:
Read about your patient before rounds or at night. Learn the ins and outs of the disease process well to better treat your patient and to better answer questions when you are pimped. See if your team is doing everything suggested by the review article. If you find something to add, mention this on rounds or to your residents and mention where you learned it (uptodate). Everyone in medicine respects the review articles on uptodate. If you mention that your information comes from uptodate, everyone will now it is reliable. In the same vein, NEVER admit you learned something from wikipedia…even if it is a great resource sometimes.
My name is Andrew and I am a first year resident training to be an ophthalmologist. I created ShortWhiteCoats to provide medical students, residents, and the public with all the information I spent so many hours looking for during medical school.
2 comments
omer
November 20, 2014 at 7:27 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
UptoDate is a great resource, but never the ultimate one. It NEVER replaces reading studies yourself, and NEVER should a doctor rely only on UTD>
Andrew
December 29, 2014 at 4:48 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
While I agree that nothing takes the place of personal study, resources like uptodate are review articles written by respected physicians in the field and are generally very good. What is the difference between reading an article on uptodate written by an expert or reading an article in a book written by an expert? I consider online reviews like Cochran and uptodate to be very similar to books. In fact, they are likely more up-to-date (pun intended).