I opened up my big Study Guide to the first page of review information and the first thing I found was Levers: 1st Class, 2nd Class, 3rd Class. OK, I get that. Then the review quickly descended into minutia: the bones of the wrist: scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. Tendons that make up the rotator cuff of the shoulder: supraspinatus, infaspinatus, teres minor, subscapularis. What movements do these muscles cause? Abduction, internal rotation, and external rotation, depending on the muscle. I turned to my trusty Anatomy Coloring Book and started coloring, using my eyes, my hands, and prolonged attention to try to internalize these details.
I recently attended an excellent NPTE review course taught by, it turns out, a fellow Duke alum. Ed Kane, PT, PhD, ECS, SCS, ATC (yes, he’s highly qualified) gave us not only factual information, but test-taking strategies and insight into the layers of knowledge and reasoning being tested. The 5-hour, 250-question test is meant to ensure entry-level competence in PT, and requires roughly 75% correct answers to pass. In the sample tests given during the seminar, I had about a 50% correct rate. I think that’s not too bad for being 22 years out of practice!
Back home, I reached the review of special tests to distinguish certain musculoskeletal deficiencies, such as Yergason’s, Adson’s, and McMurray’s tests. Surely they don’t expect one to know these tests by these random person names, do they? Um, yep, they do. Why can’t they call Yergason’s test the Bicipital Tendon Test, Adson’s the Shoulder Extension Thoracic Outlet Test, and McMurray’s the Meniscal Tear Test? And disease names are worse: Osgood-Schlatter’s disease? Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease? Come on!
I find it really annoying that I have to memorize a whole layer of irrelevant terms. Yeah, it was great that you discovered these maladies, Messrs. Osgood, Schlatter, Charcot, Marie and Tooth (Tooth?), but I’m renaming your diseases to suit my limited memory capacity. Osgood-Schlatter’s disease, a rupture of the growth plate at the tibial tubercle, is henceforth dubbed Not-good Tatters of the tibial epiphysis. I’m calling Charcot-Marie-Tooth, an atrophy of the peroneal muscles of the lateral calf, “My leg, not my Tooth,” not to be confused with Legg-Calvé-Perth’s disease, the avascular necrosis of the femoral head (so I’d better be careful with my names).
Looking ahead in the 437 pages of densely organized outlines in my review guide is risky. Realizing that I’ve got to learn about the endocrine and metabolic systems, or name all the cranial and spinal nerves and know what effect a lesion at any location will have, or know about descriptive and inferential statistics, is intimidating, and seeing the sheer volume of information can be overwhelming. How can I possibly relearn all this stuff? If I step back and fathom what I’m trying to do, I might abandon it all, deciding it’s too much.
And yet, after hours, days, and weeks of looking up terms (love my laptop!), hand-drawing or coloring anatomical structures, reviewing videos, and creating charts, I see that I am relearning it. I get it! I remember why I went into this field in the first place: because I find it fascinating. And I find something unexpected about studying it again: it’s fun! I rediscover amusing PT terms like “ipsilateral” and "homonymous hemianopsia" and muscles like the tenor fascia latae, that cute muscle at the upper outer thigh that you see in elite athletes like runners and gymnasts.
So now, when I look ahead to the remaining 300 or so pages in my guide, still feeling somewhat daunted, I also think, “Cool! I’m going to know all this stuff when I’m done!” (Or maybe 75% of it, anyway!)
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