Should I read Harrison in MBBS?

 How many of you guys love medicine as a subject?

If you ask the same question to me then I will say that I like the subject a lot. But it doesn't mean that I am going to read the medicine the whole day. and By reading medicine the whole day I mean reading Harrison. You guys might be aware of the fact that Harrison is considered "The Backbone of the Med School". But is it really worth reading whole books cover by the cover if I am just doing MBBS?

I use to get a lot of queries from a lot of medical students that whether they should start studying Harrison from the beginning of their clinical subjects to get a strong foundation. I would simply like to say No to this approach. Yes! you might be surprised to hear but it's not the best way neither the second-best way. 

See, Harrison is a huge book. It's an ocean of vast knowledge where everything is very expanded and linked with each other. You will need a lot of time to just read every like of the book by heart and most probably the double of that to learn every line of it. But then what about the other 18 subjects of your MBBS. Who is going to complete them?

Here in this article, I am going to talk about the benefits and the issues that you will face if you are going to read the whole Harrison during your MBBS by heart.

Note: - I don't want to discourage anyone from completing that book, it's a wonderful book for medicine. I am just putting my views regarding some very common queries which people ask. Here I am going to tell most of the things in the Indian Medical Colleges Context, but they might be helpful for others a well

Issues

• Time Consuming: - Harrison is not a review book. It's a textbook and the Big one. It is having more than 4000 pages and the font size of that book is also very small that makes the book very lengthy. It will consume a lot of time if you go through the book line by line to understand one thing. If you will give whole of your time to medicine only then how you are going to complete rest of your subjects for exams.
• Very Vast: - For me, Harrison is a reference book and I use it for gathering information about some topics that I don't understand from my other books of medicine. It's too vast and too lengthy to even complete a single topic from it quickly.
• Hard to Write Exams with Harrison: - Let's say you have read the Harrison before your exams successfully, but the main problem comes when you are going to write answers from that knowledge that you gained from the book. Why? because you have read a lot of stuff in the paragraph manner and you don't how to represent the stuff in your answer sheet. Also, you will have a lot of information regarding something that might be very relevant according to you and you want to write it in your answer paper but, but, but you have limited time and you have to complete all the answers.
• Lack Of Time for Other Subjects: - So guy it's very obvious that if you like medicine then you are dreaming to get a PG seat in Medicine. You might also know that the cutoff for Internal Medicine in India is very high. If you think that you can end up with a very good rank by just reading medicine then it's not true. You have to work on other major subjects like Surgery, Obs Gyne, etc. also. With medicine alone, you cannot get a good rank. You have to plan accordingly and give proper time to all other subjects also.

 Benefits

• Good Concepts: - If you will somehow manage to complete the Harrison during your MBBS then literally you will be having a very good conceptual knowledge regarding the physiology of the human body and the pathology of the diseases. Things will be very easy for you and definitely, you will become very good at history-taking as well.
• Good Integration with Other Subjects: - As I said earlier, Harrison is a vast ocean of knowledge and everything here is very expanded and integrated. So if you will complete it by heart then your understanding of other subjects will also improve and you will able to integrate subjects with each other.

Completing Harrison is a really very challenging task especially when you are an MBBS student where you have to complete the rest of the other subjects in a limited time. I am not saying that it's impossible to complete it. I just want to convey that it's not necessary to complete the whole book in UG. You will be going to get admission in MD Medicine and that would be the best time to read and complete Harrison.

By this article, I never meant to discourage anyone to complete the book. I just presented my thoughts, I just want to tell you what I feel should be done. 

Harrison For Competitive Exams

As far as NEET PG or NEXT is concerned I really don't find any need to read Medicine from Harrison. The strong explanation behind it is that when we prepare for any competitive exam we should pay more attention to revisions and crisp study materials. In the end, the thing that matters in the exam is your speed and accuracy, yeah definitely knowledge also but what would you do with that knowledge that is not relevant at your level. 

Choose the weapons that will help you in war, Not that which you can't use at the right time.

So, I would like to say that rather than going with the bulk of knowledge pay more attention to revision strategies. Here is one of my articles on "How to Revise Efficiently" if you want to know about some revision tricks.

If you want to know more about the NEXT Exam the here is the Article Link.

 

If you have any queries feel free to comment below and Keep me Supporting.