Mind Mapping Illness
Often I explain to my residents and medical students that in the end they will arrive at the same diagnosis as I do, it only takes them somewhat more time. Medical education is mainly about seeing many patients and recognizing illness patterns. Experts have seen many patients and developed illness scripts, a kind of algorithm. Expert physicians are constantly moving through a series of learning cycles throughout their career.
From Medical Education, a great blog
You can assist learners in a clinical setting to develop their own patterns by asking them to graph common illnesses as they progress through their training. These graphs can be kept in a binder and added to as the learner increases their knowledge. The final graph will be useful for studying for final exams. Both text-based and visual representations are acceptable depending on the student’s personal learning preference. To see a list of online tools.
As an example above this post is one script for depression, on Medmaps you can find many more. Even on psychiatry. Helpfull in medical education what do you think? Going to try it with anxiety disorders, but more for the differential diagnosis next month.
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January 8, 2010 @ 7:57 pm
I think Illness Scripts are an important tool in learning diagnostic reasoning. Medical students are used to knowing the correct answer immediately because they spent so much time memorizing for MCQ exams. In clinical settings, they feel compelled to answer quickly without analyzing and Illness Scripting forces them to look at the larger picture and do a proper diagnostic. I wrote about this here http://medicaleducation.wetpaint.com/page/Illness+Patterns
January 8, 2010 @ 9:22 pm
Thank for this additional important contribution, kind regards Dr Shock