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There’s An App For That: Helping Medical Students Master The Abdominal Exam

1 A strong abdominal exam is a must-have clinical skill for an aspiring healthcare professional.  Diagnoses spanning cirrhosis, appendicitis, hernias, peritonitis, aortic aneurysms, and cholecystitis, for example, can be suspected and even made via abdominal exam.

Unfortunately, secondary to factors which include an increasing dependence on imaging and other diagnostics, time constraints in the practice of medicine, and fewer chances for bedside instruction in medical education with work-hour regulations, physicians rely increasingly less on their physical exam skills today than has been the case in the past.

In that manner, here we review the Answers in Abdominal Examination App, released in May 2011 by Answers in Medicine.  Answers in Medicine, which specializes in presenting medical content via short modules in audio or video format for healthcare professionals, has developed a number of medical apps, including Answers in Alcoholic Liver Disease, Answers in Ulcerative Colitis, Answers in Crohn’s Disease, Answers in Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and Answers in Dyspepsia, to name several. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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