“Know Your Resources” Series: Best EKG Resources
My new motto is “Know Your Resources.” Why? Because medical knowledge is ever expanding, and with our limited time to brush up on old concepts or learn new ones, we can’t afford to wade through the quagmire of mediocre resources. We have to, in the terms of the seasoned medical student, know the “high yield” resources.
So, to start off this series I have a confession: I’m not that great at interpreting EKG’s. To the untrained eye, an EKG looks like a confusing bunch of scribbles:
And while I feel like I can recognize most of the life threatening pathology found on an EKG, I’m still not nearly as comfortable at interpreting them as I would like to be.
But why didn’t I become an expert in medical school? Well, to be honest, I feel like my instruction on EKG’s was somewhat subpar. We were referred to the most popular resource, Dale Dubin’s “Rapid Interpretation of EKG’s”, given some practice EKG’s, and a few lectures and that was it. Part of the problem with this approach, I feel, is that we mostly covered EKG’s during the jam-packed cardiology block (3 weeks) during 3rd year, when we could only allot a very limited amount of time to them.
At this point in my training, as an intern, I never interpret an EKG alone. I always have an upper level to tell me if I’ve missed anything. But I’m…