Additional stuff about the USMLEs

Ok, said I would come back to this the other day when I wrote about advice for the USMLE. A couple of links that I have remembered since, or that are now reachable.

Ok, a really good site that someone showed me is FMG America which contains listings of all the residency programs in the States (I think) and what sort of USMLE scores you need to get on them. This was the first site that anyone showed me and seems to be pretty comprehensive (note: the actual lists are back a couple of pages from the start) with free information, although they're definitely trying to sell you a service as well. As well as this one, if you run a search on something like "residency program lists" a whole host of websites come up, but I haven't gone through them all...

Elsevier

This is important! There've been a number of articles in various leading medical journals recently about Elsevier's involvement in the arms trade, with arguements for and against. Personally, I don't see how one can argue for, so I'm clearly gonna be a bit biased in the links I hand out, but you can always follow through and read some of the responses to these articles. First up, undoubtedly, should be the the Lancet but you need to have a login to access the articles (which, in many cases, are still free anyway); however, I've lost my details. So, instead, I refer you first to the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine which was the first to print an article about "Reed-Elsevier's hypocrisy in selling arms and health"; this was soon followed by the British Medical Journal who published an article entitled "Reed Elsevier's arms trade," and this one was to incite a number of rapid responses. Ahh, have just discovered that the BMJ requires authentication for that article also, but at least most medics in the UK will be able to access it, as well as those in the Developing World.

Other notes

One final thought before I sign off this morning. Yesterday, an International Medical Graduate (IMG) who had studied for her exams with Kaplan came back to the London Centre to give her viewpoints on the US medical system. An interesting woman, she was an Indian medical graduate (of Pune Medical School) and had first come to the UK to study in Anaesthetics, where she had almost completed her training - before going to Toronto to do a Fellowship. At that point, she went to the States where she basically started over again, beginning as a first year Resident. She's now an academic attending at UMass: Dr. Shaheen Shaikh and, although her focus seemed to be quite different from mine (the number of times she mentioned how much one could earn!) her story was very interesting, and also encouraging. She also attributed a lot to Kaplan, which actually I do too: the focussing of the course towards the exams, and the knowledge and emphases that have changed since medical school... but, like myself, she only came back to do these exams having been graduated for some time, and from quite a senior/specialised position post-membership.