THE MOST EXCITING OF ALL MEDICAL SPECIALITIES
Ask any medical student which is the most intimidating and frustrating of all clinical rotations. The reply is all too predictable. Ask any neurologist which is most interesting and fun speciality of all. Of course his answer will be Neurology.
The frustration with neurology to a great extent arises from the total disconnect between the clinical neurology and basic neuroscience. And this is not limited to hapless medical students. Many a neurology board exam candidate discovers in the course of his or her oral boards that when faced with a clinical scenario, they are expected to come up quickly with an accurate localization, differential diagnosis, and a coherent management plan. That is when they discover that the rambling answers that is often acceptable during ward rounds no longer fly.
Open any standard neurology book. To start with , the chapters are categorized by disease categories. There is a 500 page chapter on epilepsy, another 300 page chapter on neurodegenerative diseases, and so on. But when you see a neurology patient, they don't show up and say "Doc, I am here for my neurodegenerative disease." He is more likely to say,"Doc, my wife says I have been acting strange these last few months." That is when you start wading through a thousand page neurology text, looking for diseases that make you act strange!
Not any more! Neurology tutor 1.0 is a pioneering effort in teaching clinical neurology. When I first started working on it, I was preparing for my Neurology boards. I decided to put together a symptom-based instructional software, which would address every single (or most) clinical scenario that you could potentially run into, that pertains to neurology.
TRIED AND TESTED IN THE LINE OF FIRE
After going through all my clinic charts, (this was at my practice in Grand Island Nebraska), I compiled a list of symptoms which I felt covered all or almost all of the neurological clinical presentations that we as neurologists or primary physicians tend to be confronted with. And every minute of that process I told myself,"This is not like residency times. You can't stand there and ramble on and hope the attending physician either remembers that it is time for lunch or forgets what he asked you to start with" (trust me, that works!) . This is the board exam zone- you are entering a no-spin zone, so to speak (apologies to O'Reilly!)
To borrow some jargon from the military, this was not an exercise; this was real. I was staking the outcome of my own oral boards on the quality of this product.
Every case scenario in Neurology Tutor starts with a common neurological symptom. Most neurology books give you pages and pages of descriptions of hundreds of different conditions and then says 'good luck'.
Neurology tutor 1.0 takes a real-life approach. The program lets you access ninety different case scenarios.This covers everything from the confused patient who is found wandering the street to the otherwise completely normal dude who is presenting with numbness in his tongue. It walks you through the localization, the differential diagnosis, investigation and management. Unlike many hair-puller books, Neurology tutor does not tell you "Well, he is CNS vasculitis. Now go ahead and treat it". Neurology tutor suggests specific treatment regimens that are used in real life clinics and hospitals.
When I first put this together, it was a 'survival kit' for my own neurology oral board exams. And for the last 2 weeks before the exams, this was the only source of information that I utilized. When I walked into the exam room, I was confident that there was no clinical vignette that the examiners could conjure up that was not on my list of 90 neurological case scenarios. And when I was answering their questions, I was basically reading out those scenarios from memory. Everything they expected me to tell them was there. Localization, differential diagnosis, investigations and management.
After successfully passing my boards (not many authors can claim that they test ran their book or software for their own board exams) I decided to convert what was originally a 500 page manual for my own use into a more nimble and faster and easier to handle software. I created Neurology Tutor 1.0 entirely on the Visual Basic 6.0 programming platform.
DESIGNED TO HELP YOU ACHIEVE RESULTS
Let me put it like this: if you were on a desert island (with a bunch of patients, that is) , and you were allowed just one neurology software or book or other source of information, Neurology tutor is the one that is most likely to give you the most bang for the buck.
Neurology Tutor 1.0 is something you can have on your desktop PC or your laptop. This is a program you can turn to when there is a patient sitting in front of you, with a neurological complaint, and you want a quick, safe, competent and coherent plan of action. You need a software that can tell you in clear terms the possible location of the lesion. You need a software to go through the differential diagnosis. You do not need a laundry list of differential diagnoses that so many books provide. When was the last time that one of those laundry lists helped you? You need coherent information about the differential disgnosis that is actually usable for that live patient sitting in front of you. You don't need a laundry list of all the tests that Acme diagnostics has to offer. You need specific guidance on which tests are most likely to be useful and pertinent in that specific case. And you need meaningful guidance on what to do with those test results when they come back. And finally, now that you have a diagnosis, you need pertinent information on treatment options and drug dosages, as well as precautions to be undertaken when prescribing those drugs. During my residency I searched long and hard for a source of information that would do all of the above. There is none that I know of. That is what makes Neurology Tutor 1.0 so unique.
LIKE A SWISS ARMY KNIFE
If I were to summarize Neurology Tutor 1.0 in one sentence, I would say that it provides quick, pertinent, competent and safe guidance on neurological decision making. There is no long rambling and incoherent discussions that many books customarily include in order to impress editors. The Neurology Tutor 1.0 software program has one primary aim- to make life easier for any physician or neurologist who is seeing a patient with neurological complaints. I personally like to compare it to a swiss-army knife; this humble gizmo sure does not have the glitz and glamor of a samurai sword, but is much more likely to useful in day-to-day life.
FOR PRIMARY PHYSICIANS AND NEUROLOGISTS
I believe Neurology Tutor 1.0 will be useful for Primary physicians as well as neurologists. I have seen a lot of "dumbed-down" neurology books that claim to cater to Primary Physicians. Three years in rural Nebraska taught me one thing- Primary docs are anything but dumb and they do a tremendous job of providing excellent care. Neurology Tutor 1.0 is useful tool for primary physicians. It does not say, "well, this is where you page the neurologist on call." Instead, it gives you useful and practical information that you can use.
