Teaching Rounds: A Visual Aid to Teaching Internal Medicine Pearls on the Wards

Book excerpt: A unique tool for teaching and learning the top 100 most teachable topics in internal medicine There are many challenges for residents when training students who are making the big "jump" from preclinical to clinical. Most notably, they need to find time to pick and prepare topics to teach in meaningful ways without the availability of a blackboard in the learning hospital. Students also need to quickly be able to grasp these concepts quickly and with the ability to recall them later. This teaching manual primarily focuses on physiology/pathophysiology/exam findings with the goal of providing content to make teaching and learning on the wards easier for both attendings/senior residents and interns/medical students. It features the 100 most teachable topics (clinical pearls) in an image-based presentation and will cover all the major disciplines of internal medicine, including cardiology, gastroenterology, endocrine, and infectious disease. Each topic, or card, has an image on one side to prompt discussion (ECG, CXR, physical exam finding, etc.), and the flip side includes teaching points organized in question and answer format. They are presented in a pocket-sized binder with removable cards so both residents and students can remove only the topics of the day or ones they need to study. Each topic area has been reviewed by a specialist at Harvard Medical School. Visual, easy-to-use and reference tool for on-the-go Discusses the "why" behind a teachable topic Q&A format serves both rotation and exam prep Case-based to practice clinical pearls and complex topics