Speaker 1: So I've done pretty well during my time at medical school and the majority of my learning has been through websites and online resources rather than textbooks. All of these websites I'm going to mention I've used heavily for my learning during my time at medical school. They're all as legitimate as a textbook created in line with clinical guidance and by existing doctors or medical professionals and I would recommend them to every medical student. They're also all free apart from the final one. Hi everyone, welcome back to my channel. My name's Hibba and I'm a final year medical student studying at the University of Manchester. Starting from the websites that helped me the most in my pre-clinical years, so before we started our hospital placements and when we were just learning all of the theory, the first website on this list is MSD Manuals. So MSD Manuals was an online resource that not a lot of my colleagues used to use at the time or actually were aware of and I always wondered why because this was at times the only resource I would use for my PBL sessions. It's a fantastic online resource that has a list of pretty much every medical condition under the sun and what I really like about MSD Manuals is that it goes into immense detail about the pathophysiology of all the various conditions and sometimes it would be the only website that answered my questions accurately on the disease process of the different conditions that I was studying. And obviously in the early stages of medical school it's really important to understand that process of how a disease comes about. With that said though, it's definitely a clinically oriented resource so it does go into symptoms of a condition, how to manage it, how to diagnose it, which again really helped my understanding. Probably the only reason I moved away from using MSD Manuals in my clinical years was because it's an American website so sometimes when I was studying there would be very minor differences in for example which blood tests you would order, when you would refer a particular condition, how you would treat a particular condition because obviously the UK has its own specific guidance and protocols for that sort of stuff which is where I'm studying and where I'm going to be practicing. But as I mentioned these differences are really quite small and for the most part I'd really really recommend this resource to every medical student. There are different versions of the website so make sure you're using the professional version which is made specifically for healthcare professionals and not the consumer version which is simplified for the general public. The next online resource I used to death in my pre-clinical years was Teach Me Anatomy. By far the absolute best online resource out there to study anatomy. This website played a key role in my anatomy studies and I used it to prepare for every single anatomy session. I have a more detailed video on my week-on-week process on how to learn anatomy which I think is the best way so do give that a watch afterwards if you're interested. But what I love about Teach Me Anatomy is that it's just enough detail at the level that a medical student needs to know so not too much and not too little. Textbooks can be really overwhelming especially if you're looking at a certain area of anatomy for the first time and you're not familiar with the vocabulary but with the diagrams and explanations on Teach Me Anatomy it just made it very simple and easy to understand. I think I would have really struggled learning anatomy if it wasn't for this website. The next website that was an absolute saviour during my pre-clinical years was a website called drugbank.ca. I think it's actually a Canadian website but it's really widely used and everyone in my PBL group knew about this one. Everyone used to use it and it's basically a free online database that contains loads of information on pretty much every single medication and its targets. I would use this resource a lot for pharmacology when we were told to learn the different mechanisms of actions of different medications and sometimes this would be the only website where I could actually find the mechanism of action, the pharmacodynamics, the pharmacokinetics of a medication which basically means how the medication acts on the body and how the body acts on the medication. It's really really comprehensive and sometimes even the nice BNF wouldn't have the mechanism of action and this information but this website did. Obviously don't use it to learn dosing regimens unless you're in Canada because obviously that sort of thing varies with the country that you're in but it was a great reliable resource to learn how the medications actually work and their interactions and so forth. So these next few websites that I'm going to talk about are websites that I used both in my pre-clinical and clinical years so I'm still currently using them right now. The first you may have already heard of but that is BMJ Best Practice and BMJ stands for British Medical Journal. This is an absolute favourite which I've been using since my first year of medical school and I'll probably continue using even after I graduate into my career and I say it's like a British version of MSD manuals. It's similar in that it has subsections for all of the different medical conditions that you need to know about on things like pathophysiology, etiology, epidemiology, how to treat it, prognosis etc but it's obviously built around British guidelines so the guidelines are more accurate for me as a soon-to-be doctor in the UK. I'd say it does take a while to get the hang of using best practice because sometimes it does feel like an overload of information and it's not specifically for medical students it's for doctors and other healthcare professionals as well so sometimes there will be detail that you don't need to know. So it does take a while to get used to where to find the key bits of information that you need but when you do it's pretty much a one-stop resource for everything you need to know about a condition from when it presents to how long a patient is expected to live with it. When you first go on the website it does say you need a subscription to access it but the vast majority of medical schools already subscribe to it so you don't need to buy a subscription. I'd be very very surprised if your medical school didn't so you can't just log into it using your university's login. Alternatively you can make an Open Athens account which is free for anyone in the healthcare world and you can access it this way instead. So then we have the NICE official website which includes the NICE BNF. NICE stands for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and this is the governing body in the UK that sets doctors their guidelines and protocols on how to do what to do and when to do and it's backed up by a large evidence base. As you can tell from what I've just told you their website is going to be really helpful and that's where you can find all of the guidance that they've issued on how to treat a medical condition, how to refer, how to monitor etc. If you study at a medical school in the UK it's very important to be familiar with these guidelines because the information that is on there is going to determine what the right or wrong thing to do is in your exams. But even if you're not in the UK I can't imagine the guidelines being drastically different so I think it's still going to be a really useful resource. It also contains the NICE BNF which is the British National Formulary. It's an A-Z list of every single medication, how to prescribe it, when to prescribe it, the dosing etc. So obviously a very important resource for medical students to be able to look up any medications that they are learning about. Next up on the list of online resources that are used both in pre-clinical and clinical years is a website called MDCalc and this is basically an online calculator containing all of the different evidence-based equations, scoring systems and risk stratification tools used by doctors on a daily basis to help with their clinical decision making. For example a commonly used tool that you may already know about is the CURB-65 score to assess the severity of pneumonia and this is an evidence-based system used to determine how severe a patient's pneumonia is based on their confusion, on their urea levels, on their respiratory rate, on their blood pressure and whether or not they're over 65. Hence the acronym being CURB-65. MDCalc lets you input all these variables into their calculator and does the calculation for you for this and for thousands of other similar scoring systems used in the medical world and needless to say this is really helpful because you can't possibly remember them all in your head. The final four websites I think all medical students need to know about are websites that I only started using in my clinical years. The first one is Geeky Medics. The vast majority of medical students already know about Geeky Medics, it's very widely used, it's an absolutely fantastic resource where you can find all sorts of information and it can be really helpful for pre-clinical years as well because it has a lot of information about general medicine and anatomy but I never really felt the need to use it in my pre-clinical years just because I had already found resources that were comprehensive and that I was comfortable using which we've already discussed in this video. I mainly use Geeky Medics for its OSCE related content. Over my clinical years I've really benefited from their pages on how to perform clinical examinations which come with really helpful videos. They also have lots of information on how to take histories and when and why certain information is important to ask and they also have loads of information on how to counsel patients on different medications, diagnoses, on different treatment procedures and over the years this website has really helped me to pick up some good skills and good vocabulary and phrases to use in my OSCEs. It's definitely been a 10 out of 10 resource when it comes to OSCE practice. Next up is a website called Up To Date. Like Best Practice, when you first open the website it does ask you to subscribe to the website but as far as I'm aware every single trust in the UK purchases a subscription for their healthcare team to use so if you ask about this at your hospital or your GP practice you'll be given a login. Alternatively you can also use Open Athens as well but this is another really helpful website where you can find specific guidelines and protocols that help doctors to make decisions whilst they're on the ward. The intended purpose of this website is if for example a doctor is in a situation where they don't know the next steps on what to do, this resource will tell you what decision to make according to the best evidence available at the time in a world where guidance and evidence is constantly changing and that's why it's called Up To Date. As medical students we're unlikely to be in these sorts of situations but the website acts as a really good information bank to revise from or at least to look things up faster on placement to help you get a better understanding of why doctors are making certain decisions. The penultimate resource on this list is one of my favourites, well to be honest they're all my favourites, but one I'm finding myself using the most these days in preparation for finals and I've been using since third year is Zero to Finals. The founder of the Zero to Finals online resources is a doctor who actually also studied at the University of Manchester. You may have heard me talk about this website on my channel before but it's basically what it says on the tin. For almost every medical condition you need to know about for your finals it gives you start to finish information on that topic. What I love about Zero to Finals is that it's very concise, it's very straight to the point and it's made especially with a focus for exactly what you need to know for your exams. Unlike some of the other resources that are made for doctors who are already working, Zero to Finals is specifically made with a focus for your exams. So if you don't need to know it for your exams it's not on there and using the Zero to Finals resources helps me make my revision more targeted to what I actually need to know and less overwhelming. It also contains all of the relevant NICE guidance that you need to know for your exams as well. Because the notes are quite simplified I do always use it in conjunction with best practice. So once I've read through a set of Zero to Finals notes I do always just give the best practice page a read as well just to make sure I've not missed anything. But considering how tight I am on time these days I'm incredibly grateful for the doctor who made this resource to allow me to revise effectively and concisely. Last but not least on this list we have number 10 which is the only paid resource on this list but in my opinion is worth every penny. It is the QuestMed online question bank for medical students which contains thousands of practice questions in the style that you'd expect to see in your actual medical school exams. The questions are written by qualified doctors but as well as this they have pre-made flashcards, video tutorials, mock tests and a concise textbook of all of the information you need to know. It also uses an AI system to help tailor your revision to you and to the topics that you specifically need to work on. And this isn't sponsored or anything, none of anything I've said in this video is sponsored. Just from personal experience after using QuestMed to practice questions I did see a huge improvement in my exam results and whilst sitting in my exam I genuinely felt really well prepared for every single question that was coming up having used QuestMed beforehand. I really hope this video is able to give you a few ideas on where you can turn to access online resources to aid your learning and revision. Comment below which resources you already knew about and were using and which resources you didn't actually know about. Thank you so so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.