How To Study Anatomy Efficiently ?

Hello Young Medicos, so here we are with a new blog article on how to study Anatomy efficiently? I am getting a lot of questions regarding anatomy. Many new medical students are worried about Anatomy. It's very obvious because it's a very volatile subject. It has many jargons in it that itself take 2-3 weeks to get used to them. But Guys let me make me think very clear, if you start understanding anatomy then it will be a very easy and most interesting subject of the first MBBS. 

So, first thing first, as we all know that anatomy is the study of the internal architecture of the human body at both gross and microscopic levels. So, I would like to advise you not to study as a subject but study it as you are reading it to know about yourself internally. Start developing interest in the subject. I know that many of you will not agree with me about starting loving anatomy. here is a blog of mine regarding " How to prepare the hard Subject" I hope it will give you some orientation regarding how to approach the hard subjects. 

Why Anatomy Is So Important?

Anatomy is the foundation of many clinical subjects. Anatomy is the foundation of Surgery, Radiology, ENT, Ophthalmology, Orthopedics, and many other clinical subjects. If you are weak at anatomy then definitely you will end up struggling with these clinical subjects. It's the subject of basic science that covers many aspects of Surgery, without knowing the normal anatomy of the body how a Surgeon is supposed to do corrective surgery. 

You can not ignore Anatomy if somehow you managed to pass the subject in your first year without a good understanding of anatomy then this subject may haunt you in your final year. At that time you will not have sufficient time to start anatomy from the beginning. 

Let's get back to the topic, in this article I tried to convey most of the effective ways that could help you to get comfortable with anatomy. I personally tried these methods when I was in my first year of med school and it helped me a lot. So, without wasting the time let's get started.

Read from One Book only

Many of the students generally tend to refer to a lot of books for one subject. This is the worst strategy for understanding anatomy. You have to aware of the fact that you just don't have the anatomy to study throughout your first year. You can not give the whole of your time to anatomy. I admit referring from multiple can make your concepts crystal clear but it will consume a lot of time. Your standard textbooks like B.D Chaurasia or Vishram Singh are more than sufficient to learn anatomy and make good concepts. You need not refer to Gray's Anatomy every time it just consumes a lot of your time and energy. Just stick with one book till the end and you will get a good result. 

Attend Anatomy Lectures Regularly

Okay Okay, I know it's kinda hard to practice it in reality because many times anatomy lectures are very sleepy. But if you want to learn anatomy by heart you have to attend lectures. if I speak about myself, I was not very consistent in attending lectures but later I realized that I had done a huge mistake. I don't want to let you repeat the same mistake. If you don't like attending the lectures then you can go for some online lectures available on youtube or you can buy the lectures from platforms like MARROW or Prepladder. 

Try to Go through the topic before going to Dissection

Probably the best and effective way to learn anatomy is first to read it from textbooks and then apply your knowledge in the Dissection Hall. Humans are visual learners and our brain learns quickly after watching something. After reading the topic and then performing its dissection on human cadaver make your understanding better and you could retain the topic for a very long time.

After that, I don't think that you need to cram the things and have to worry about the exams.

Learn With Diagrams 

As I said earlier, we are visual learners and anatomy becomes very easy if we learn it with diagrams. with the diagram, we can get the actual view regarding the structures. I usually learn to draw the diagram first with all labels so that I could get a fair idea about the topic and then I proceed into reading the theory. This method helps me a lot and makes the anatomy very smooth and easy-going. 

Initially, you might face some problems but eventually, you find that this method is very effective and helpful.

Do regular Revisions  

As being humans our mind is programmed for forgetting things. The best thing we can do to tackle this is regular revisions. I have created a post "How To Revise efficiently " where I have explained details about everything and how regular revision works. you should refer to this amazing post. I have explained the scientific basis of forgetting and the classical forgetting curve. I hope that you will like that post as well.

Conclusion

For many students, anatomy seems very difficult. In this article, I have discussed anatomy and how to learn it efficiently. I discussed that why this subject is so important and how will it affect your academics if you don't take it seriously.

There are some of the very effective ways in the articles that helped me a lot while learning anatomy. I hope that these tips will help you a lot a well. 

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