First Aid Q&A for the USMLE Step 1, Second Edition (First Aid USMLE),   ISBN:9780071597944

Customer Rating: 

Before reading this review, it should be noted that I have not yet taken my examination, so I am speaking on how much information and knowledge I gain from each source, rather than its exam pay-out (which is obviously the most important).

With that disclaimer, this book is a good way to reinforce some topics from the First Aid for Step 1, especially when the monotonous reading of that text becomes boring and your brain gets saturated. I am a huge believer, in that as medical students instead of diversifying our portfolio (which we don't have since all of our money went to medical school :)), we should be diversifying our methods of studying and to reinforce topics in FIRST AID, this would be the way to do it. However, from my understanding the information in First Aid is not enough to score well on your boards, although it may be sufficient to pass. This book, provides very little extra information outside of the First Aid for Step 1, although a few percentage of questions do an excellent job of integrating concepts from different clinical sciences and forcing you to apply what you learned from FA rather than just memorizing it.

As other people have mentioned, and I will reiterate here, it is in no way a substitute for Kaplan QBank, USMLE world, etc. and in my opinion primarily serves a reinforcement of topics and facts presented in First Aid. In addition, there are a few minor mistakes and some direct contradictions with other texts.

Hope this helpful, good luck to everyone taking the Step 1.

Customer Rating: 

Can help you with your prepration along with the regular online Q Banks.Not a must have but definately usefull. Helped me a through Step 1

Customer Rating: 

The bottom line with this book is that it contains one block of 50 questions per organ system. So if you are doing an organ systme approach to studying for the Board then this could be helpful. However, if you are studying in a subject based format, this would be a completely waste of your money. Furthemore the questions in this book are selected from the First Aid Rx question bank, which means why buy the book if the 1 month subscription for the question bank is worth the same. besides the question bank has much better explanations than the book- as they correlate with the current version of the First Aid Step i book.

Customer Rating: 

The questions are well-written and thought provoking, but there are so many errors in the answers & explanations that I had to stop using it for my step 1 preparations-- I was simply spending too much time double checking answers that turned out to be incorrect.

Customer Rating: 

while there is no substitute for usmleworld, i used this book earlier in my med school career. i thought they were more challenging than the kaplan book.