How to Study for Clinical Medicine in PA School

Clinical medicine is your meat and potatoes of your didactic year. Once you are past the non-clinical classes, you will spend majority of your time learning diseases and how to diagnose and treat them in your clin med classes. We had three semesters of clin med at our school and we learned by organ systems such as cardiovascular, pulmonology, GI, hematology, etc.


The hardest part about clin med was figuring out what parts were important and what I could spend less time on. Each lecture had multiple diseases, and each disease had multiple subsections: epidemiology, etiology, pathogenesis, signs and symptoms, history and physical exam, imaging, labs, diagnostic criteria, treatment, and prognosis.

It took me a long time to figure this out, but here is how I approached the material for clin med:

• Study guides: I made my study guide on my computer with the lecture notes, omitting any extra information (this I learned after a few tests and figuring out the way a certain professor tests us).
• Learn: go over the lecture notes at least twice. I like to go at a slower pace and really process the information. 
• High-Yield information: before the test, I would hand write on a blank piece of paper the high yield information for every disease state so I could do a quick review before the exam. This also helped me just focus on the main parts and not every single detail. It took a lot of trial and error and this ability to weed through the information comes with time, so don't worry if you can't figure it out in the first few weeks/months. 
• Treatment only study guide: I wish I had figured this out a LOT sooner, but during my last semester I started making a treatment only study guides. I would make one big study guide with ALL the treatments for every single disease state we were going to be tested on. That study guide is the only thing I would look at right before the test and it helped me enormously to make connections. 
• Refer to the PANCE Prep Pearls book if I didn't have time to make my handwritten outlines. Lets be honest, PA school is all time consuming and there isn't always all the time in the world to learn things the pace at which you are most comfortable. When I ran out of time, I would simply refer to the book for the high yield information and forgo writing out my own notes. 
• What do I mean my high-yield information: gold standard lab/imaging tests or treatments, signs and symptoms (especially if it says pathognomonic, because that's a rarity in medicine), any unique physical exam findings, and treatment options.
• On making connections: the best advice I can ever given anyone about learning/studying is making connections. The moment you start to join the dots, you know you're on the right path. What I mean is there are a lot of parallels to draw in medicine. For example, in our rheumatology unit we made the connection that ANA (antinuclear antibody) is positive in dermatomyositis, polymyositis, scleroderma, and sjogren's syndrome. I think categorizing things like that before memorizing it makes it easier to retrieve that information during exams or in real life while treating patients. Similar connections can be made between treatments, physical findings, etc. 

When it comes to learning and studying, everyone has a different way of doing it. What I did may not help you, but I just wanted to share my two cents in case it's helpful to any of you out there. Let me know if you have any questions and feel free to share your own study methods for others in the comments below :).

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