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Learning How to Read (About Patients) with Pediatrics in Review :

December 17, 2019

One of the most consistent pieces of advice or feedback that I have received throughout my medical school, residency, and fellowship training is to take the time to read (read! read!) about my patients.

One of the most consistent pieces of advice or feedback that I have received throughout my medical school, residency, and fellowship training is to take the time to read (read! read!) about my patients. But often times, I found this advice to be rather difficult to carry out. There were of course the logistical challenges of finding time in my busy 12- (or occasionally 28-) hour workdays to sit down, uninterrupted, and critically read through an article. But I have also found myself really struggling to find clinically relevant articles that are able to distill concepts about pathophysiology and pharmacology into information that I could apply at the bedside. I could easily lose an hour by going down a PubMed rabbit hole and finding a million different articles about toxic synovitis, osteomyelitis, septic arthritis, etc, after evaluating a 2-year-old boy in clinic who was refusing to walk. Learning about Pediatrics in Review (PIR) during my intern year was a revelation for me. Here I could read a review article devoted to the evaluation of the limping child and come away with an extensive differential diagnosis to consider and a good understanding of the initial workup for this complaint. Moreover, I found that PIRarticles offered the perfect springboard to identify other articles that could help answer the many clinical questions that I encountered on a daily basis. After reading a review article about meningitis that touched on the difficulties of interpreting pretreated cerebrospinal fluid samples, I performed a more extensive literature review to better quantify the diagnostic sensitivity of a lumbar puncture following antibiotic treatment. Even now, as I complete my fellowship training, I continue to look to PIR as a journal that features articles that inform my daily clinical practice.

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