HOW TO USE OMMEDICINE

How should I use TheOMMedicine.com resources?

How to use the videos and other resources provided on our site, is one of the most commonly asked questions we receive and also one of the most difficult to answer. The method that may help one person can be completely useless to another, so while we cannot provide a direct answer to this question we can tell you how we would use it, and also what many students have mentioned has worked for them in their goal to ace the Comlex exams. The goal for all students using theommedicine should be to comprehend the information rather than memorize the slides. While we commonly include a slide that contains all of the facts to be memorized for a given topic, understanding the underlying principle will allow for long term retention of information and for a greater degree of reasoning when approaching questions.

Learn the material through our videos.

The videos on our website were specifically tailored to cover the most commonly tested concepts on the comlex exams. Over 50, of what are considered the “gold standard”, resources were taken into consideration when choosing what information to include and exclude in our presentations. This approach has allowed us to provide you with the vast majority of the testable osteopathic manipulative medicine topics and other comlex specific information in a concise video, that highlights what appears most often. However, watching these videos alone is unlikely to be sufficient to prepare for comlex. Making your study experience active, by taking notes or drawing the concepts described in the video is likely to help you retain the information longer. In addition, we have made the videos unrestricted in the number of times they can be viewed. This allows students to re-watch the video as many times as needed, because repetition is another suggested technique to learn the osteopathic principles described in each video. Finally, we suggest that you practice the techniques. Many areas of osteopathic manipulative medicine (OMM) are centered around patient interaction and performing treatments on another individual. Practicing these treatments with others will also help students to better understand and remember the proper positioning and other osteopathic concepts describe in the videos.

Solidify the information with our minimum-competency worksheets.

In the header of each video, by the title, you will find several additional resources to use at your disposal. One of the resources available to download is the minimum-competency worksheet. These worksheets are comprised of fill in the blank, open response and multiple choice questions based on the content in the video it is associated with. These questions were designed to evaluate if the student was able to understand and apply the most basic concepts described in the associated video, or in other words, see if the student has minimum competency. We suggest that each worksheet is done at least 1 day after watching the video. If you are able to easily answer all of the questions on the worksheet then you are on the right track. If the questions posed some difficulty, then you will need more time to strengthen your understanding of that osteopathic principle, and we would suggest you re-watch the associated video.

Commit the information to memory with our pre-made, video specific anki decks.

Another resource located in the header of each video, next to the title, is a pre-made anki deck based on our videos. Anki is a powerful tool that uses spaced repetition as a means to commit information to long term memory, and has become a favorite resource among medical students for this reason. We suggest that after watching each video, you download the deck associated with the video or un-suspend the cards with the tags related to that video. Staying current with your cards and reviews from the beginning of your first or second year of medical school is a great way to get ahead of the game. There are currently over 1000 cards in our deck, but be sure to check back regularly as it is routinely being updated.

Test your information with questions.

While we do not currently have a question bank (outside of the questions provided in the worksheets), if you want to do well on your comlex exams, it is imperative that you test your knowledge with questions. We currently recommend that students do at least 300 osteopathic manipulative medicine focused, or “pure OMM” in the few weeks before their comlex exams. Reviewing both incorrect and correct questions should be performed. One method that has proven successful for many students is to ask yourself what must be changed in the question stem to make each answer choice correct. For example, if a question stem was describing the motion of the sacrum for a RonL sacral torsion, what motion could have been changed in the question stem to make the correct answer a LonL. Regardless of your approach, doing questions and reviewing them is essential to doing well on the Comlex level 1 and Comlex level 2 exams.