In reading Goljan RR (or any book for that matter), I find that the content can always be divided into three: a. those that needs to be memorized, b. those that just needs to be understood, and c. those that are only "nice to know" (meaning some details can be forgotten and it won't matter).

Since you are only starting patho in med school, it might be hard for you to make this decision and filter info out. If you have a qbook or any source of material that has usmle patho questions in them, you can start with that. Once you're familiar with the questions they ask, you'll know which ones are important in the book and you won't have a problem reading it.

Also, you might find Goljan audio to be helpful. He'll point out which ones are important in the book so you won't need to memorize everything.

 

Why are you reading review books???

You're a med student, you should be reading proper text books. Get Robbins and start reading it. Review books is for when you just wanna quickly go over the material before an exam. Build your foundations man...don't even think about looking at review books yet.

I don't know about everyone else, but when I was in med school everyone read proper text books....lippincott, guyton, Katzung, Robbins.

Drop that book for now...and re-open it when you know your s-h-i-t.

 

Partially true. If you know general patho well from Robbins(cell injury, inflammation, repair) you can easily cover systemic pathology from Goljan. However, this means that anything in Goljan you don't understand you should look up in Robbins. Goljan is good enough to be used alone as a text.

Robbins, imo, is overrated. You can't retain a huge chunk of it even after many reads. There is way too much in there that you don't have to know and you will never remember. 10 pages on ovarian tumors? Pleasee. It is very time consuming. The little you do retain can be found in review books. Also, Basis Robbins is supposed to be for Pathology residents, not medical students.

 

You are finding Goljan difficult because you're learning pathology for the first time. I would recommend that you give Robbins Pathology one quick read and then use Goljan. It will make things easier to understand.

What I did when I studied for the first time was read a chapter from Robbins, then listen to to goljan audio, then read the corresponding chapter from Goljan and finally do Robbins review questions. This really helped my concepts and made a lot of things in Goljan easy to understand.

 

Robbins patho is a textbook assigned to us by med school so obviously I'm using it for classes and exams. But my school is going too slowly with it (2 years: overkill much? At least I'm done with 1 year) and I want to get step 1 out of the way fast so I'm using Goljan for that. But I feel like tearing the book whenever I try to study from it!!!! :indifferent:

I'll try listening to audios as I read the book. Hope that helps.
Btw is patho really that high-yeild a subject?

 

Yep, it's high yield due to the intrinsic structure of usmle questions. Usmle questions take 2-3-step level of thinking and usually during the 1st step, you'll need to "diagnose". That's where patho comes in. Bec patho is basically about the disease. The last step in the thought process may ultimately be immuno or pharma but somewhere along the way, you'll need patho knowledge.