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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Learning How to Read (About Patients) with Pediatrics in Review
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Learning How to Read (About Patients) with Pediatrics in Review
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December 17, 2019
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