How I Would Study in Med School (If I Could Start Over)

Learn from my medical training mistakes to improve yours.

Every week, I distil what really works for improving results, memory, depth of understanding, and knowledge application from over a decade of coaching into bite-sized emails.

=== Paid Training Program ===

(Designed for busy students and professionals aiming to achieve top results without endless studying. 77% of our students cover the same amount of study material in 30% less time within 1 month.)

=== Timestamps ===

0:00 Intro
00:58 Mistake #1
02:32 Mistake #2
04:48 Mistake #3
06:39 My learning strategy for clinical placement
17:32 Tip #1
19:47 Tip #2
20:19 Tip #3

=== About Dr Justin Sung ===

Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, certified teacher, research author, and former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.

[JustinSung]

Every week, I distil what really works for improving results, memory, depth of understanding, and knowledge application from over a decade of coaching into bite-sized emails.

[tornedsky]

"you are not a medical student, you are a doctor in training."

[almilacinar]

One think that changed my grade from 60% to 80-85% was to understand physiology and anatomy in a relevant way. I didn’t learn random details again but what I did was instead of memorizing symptoms and clinical features. I simply learned the reason why. For example nephrotic syndrome. I can just memorize proteinurea, pitting edema coagulopathy and lipidemia. I had learned why protein is going away, and because you lose protein you have less albumin in your blood and that makes your oncotic pressure low and you body needs to fix it somehow. You have two ways, 1- you can increase the products that take part in oncotic pressure 2- you can decrease the amount of water in your blood. For 1, your liver tried to produce more albumin but you don’t have any, so it makes lipids to compensate. 2nd you lose the water, the water outside of your veins cause edema. The thing that keepsmthe water from mobilizing in your body is albumin, you don’t have any so water mobilises and that’s why when you press on it you cause pitting. Antithrombin 3 is a protein you need so that you dont clot. You lose that also and now you have coagulopathy. This way you can quickly work your way around everything and even give educated guesses on things you don’t actually know so that your chances of getting the questions right even if it is something you are not familiar with. This way you can also create discussions, give well-thought answers to your teachers and ask meaningful questions in classroom and on rotations which will make a place in you professor’s head even though you are not correct everytime since you are showing that you have general understanding of the systems, you analyze and compare things and you can think critically.

[janeeyre]

I am a surgeon of 25 years experience and reasonably famous in my field in my region. I am in a level of creating new technique to suit patients, and able to combined patient perception of disease/ past experience to formulate a plan. Sometimes I am also able to undermine underlying motivation and demotivation. Takes lots of practice. The problem in medical school is u need to perform within certain period. Medicine is lifelong learning. Be humble. Patients is always our teacher. Same disease manifest differently in different patients. Keep a keen observation and keep an open mind. I dare not teach medical students because my management is not that text book but it works. Also one more tips: ur grade in medical school is not that important. Those of us who do well in future career are actually medical students with mediocre grades

[pranavgunti]

This title is awesome, it’s like “how I would study software if I could start over” cuz I see that trend soo much but this is more about studying rather than what you study

[pattube]

In summary:

1. Forest, then trees. Common things are common. Look for horses, not zebras. So focus first on learning the simple, basic, foundational, fundamental things, then get the details. For example, read a book like Clinical Pathophysiology Made Ridiculously Simple, then Pathoma or even Robbins Pathology.

2. How is it clinically relevant? Figure out how this knowledge or information is going to be necessary for real living people. For patient care. Don't think in terms of a long list of abstract diseases, per se, but think in terms of signs and symptoms. A patient will not present with a STEMI or aortic dissection, but rather chest pain that feels like an elephant sitting on them, etc. In other words, read a book like From Symptom to Diagnosis, Frameworks in Internal Medicine, or the Oxford Cases in Medicine and Surgery, because these books will teach you how to think in schemas or frameworks or whatever you want to call it.

[DennisCNolasco]

Generalizing the tips for any subject:
1. Simplify, simplify, simplify! Simplify & make the material intuitive to you--less is more. How will I use this info IRL? Fake it till you make it.
2. Pick your losses. Concentrate on what’s most important to you & why (fit other areas in if time allows).
3. Projects - Center studying on what you’re likely to use during the week for your current project. This allows you to apply/build on the experience for your project from what you just studied.

[memeranque]

Been waiting for this type of content.

As a medical student who started late in medschool (28 y/o) due to problem in studying; thank you Justin!

[maxgiesken]

Not many folks even in med school have the insight to come to these conclusions. I’ve had a similar experience to what you describe. It is extremely interesting to me that I could have information encoded in my brain in one direction (x disease causes chest pain, y disease causes chest pain and so on) but when asked in the reverse direction (what are the causes of chest pain?) the neural pathways to answer that question literally don’t exist. Absolutely fascinating but drives me absolutely crazy. Not only do we have to learn things in a way that we can remember them, we also have to worry about learning them in a way that they will come to mind when the situation arises in real life, which seems crazy but these are definitely 2 separate objectives. I think we learn the preclinical knowledge in a way (disease oriented knowledge) that makes it impossible to retrieve it and effectively use it with an undifferentiated patient in front of you. The first 1.5 years in my opinion should be spent learning like this (bc I think you have to in order to gain effective knowledge) then 6 months or something should be spent drilling down on how to approach patients clinically which requires your knowledge to work in the reverse direction. Then you can go on to clinical rotations and build on that with patients

[habit_of_studying]

I graduated medical school when in my country we only started having home PCs, and the internet was very slow (I'm not that old :D it just took time for technology to reach it). I obviously had no clue about a better way of learning, and studied exactly as you described - for exams, trying to cram as much as possible, forgot everything the day after. I managed to work in a small hospital, where one needs quite restricted amount of knowledge. 5 years later I moved to another country, and I was shocked, I was supposed to know much much much more, the students and interns that worked in our department knew a lot more than myself, asked me so many Qs, I was burned out trying to catch up, I think mostly because I still used the same methods, saw no connections, and needed to restudy material all the time. Currently I'm on a maternity leave, I've watched all of your videos, changed my learning style and it just makes so much more sense. I'm so grateful that you share this knowledge for free. I hope you understand how many lives have you changed. Thank you.

[ReflectionOcean]

By YouSum Live

00:00:50 Overengineer your learning approach for exams.
00:02:29 Be discerning about the level of detail you study.
00:04:45 Utilize your clinical attachment days effectively.
00:06:14 Study topics from a clinical reasoning perspective first.
00:08:58 Simplify complex topics to aid understanding.
00:11:20 Deliberately seek simpler ways to understand overwhelming information.
00:15:34 Study Anatomy with a practical, operational mindset.
00:17:37 Make things simpler and more intuitive to understand complex topics.
00:17:59 Break down overwhelming information into simpler parts before diving into details.
00:18:22 Consider the clinical application of knowledge before learning new concepts.
00:19:00 Recognize the difference between being a medical student and a doctor in training.
00:19:46 Selectively prioritize what to learn and focus on clinically relevant information.
00:20:17 Optimize clinical placements by aligning your study with anticipated experiences.
00:22:00 Engage actively during clinical placements to maximize learning opportunities.

By YouSum Live

[averll]

''a unique experience that i dont wanna do again'' but you did!! and now it lead you to your position now, an obstacle that opened other doors for you while closed this one ❤❤

[Scottlp]

Find the shortest book on any topic and read the whole thing.

[karimyounes]

Thank you Dr.Sung
I've graduated from med school more than a year ago and I couldn't agree more on what you said..
I also think that one should be aware when things are going wrong early on and act actively to that because the more time goes on the more you'll be overwhelmed and it's really easy to fall into depression especially in medschool..but as always.. Never Give Up!

[terminallytoast]

Hello from Pakistan Justin! Your tips have been helping A TON, please never stop making content

[MB-bczz]

As a first year medical student, these tips are gold! Especially for preclinical years! Hats off to you Dr! Amazing tips!

[portiaokafor]

This video is literally an answered prayer! The way you broke it down was absolutely genius, and now I feel that much more empowered to succeed through my preclinical years.

[randommedstudent]

Watching this while studying for my final year medical school final exams. It may be too late for me to apply what I learnt in this video, but I’ve internalized it and can now teach it to juniors below me. Great video Justin!

[Raylight]

I'm currently preparing for NEET - UG and saw this video as I was struggling to study. I'm really glad that I found this video! Thank you so much for sharing your experiences :D❤

2:35 I had the same mindset to learn everything and whenever I failed to do so I would procrastinate and that would lead me to just memorize for my exams (short term memory) as I procrastinated the whole time just because I thought it was hard.

18:59 This line hits hard. :")

[dsterry]

A lot of humility in this video. ❤

Sounds like the idea is to work backward from hands-on experience to know what you need to focus on. But you still need some base level of knowledge to understand the hands-on experience. How do you recommend studying for necessary information you need to have before you can participate in a hands-on setting?