 Anatomy is often remembered as one of the most difficult things that you will learn in medical school. The sheer amount of content you need to know to pass an anatomy exam is daunting and to add to that, everything is in Latin. Great. The world of anatomy can seem really overwhelming but having finished medical school and now started work as a doctor, I feel like I've learned a lot about the best ways to wrap your head around it. Your driving force when studying anatomy should always be pathology and clinical application. You will rarely be asked an anatomy based question that isn't directly relevant to some sort of commonly seen pathology in a clinical setting. Well you might and that sucks but it's unlikely to be the entire focus of your exam. For example, out of all of the nerves and arteries, veins, lymphatic drainage in the arm, probably the most important is the median nerve and also the radial nerve but let's focus on the median for now. So you should know how the median nerve courses throughout the arm, where it might be most easily damaged and what symptoms or signs you might expect a patient to have if it isn't fact damaged. In the leg, you'll commonly be asked anatomy questions related to the most common sports injuries, things like ACL tears, vegas or various impact, oscule slatter disease, etc. Similarly, in the chest, you want to know how all the different structures relate to each other, to be able to identify them on an x-ray or an MRI or whatever but also so that if one of these structures expands, let's say you go to a tumor or you get an aneurysm or hypertrophy of one of the chambers of the heart, you can think about what structures are surrounding it and what other things might be affected. There's obviously a lot more to this and it's more complicated than I can make it seem in a couple of sentences in this video but the idea that questions on exams will follow commonly seen clinical presentations is quite important. The more questions that you do from past paper questions, online learning anatomy platforms and things like that, you'll see what parts of the body examiners like to focus on. So the bottom line is, do as many questions as you can. In my opinion, the absolute best way to study anatomy, which you can't really replace with anything else, is actually seeing the anatomy in real life in a cadaver. And in my first and second year in medical school at King's College London, we had the incredible opportunity to do first hand dissection on a real human cadaver. Each week we spent several hours in the cadaver room cutting into and peeling back the layers of anatomy of a real person who had donated their body in the name of science. And even now when I think about anatomy, I have etched in my head some of the things that I saw in the dissection room. It was such an emotional and intense learning experience that I haven't forgotten a lot of what I learned in that room. And when I try to visualize the 3D presentation of different parts of the anatomy and how the different organs and structures are related to each other in front of or behind to the side, whether they pass over each other or around, it's just so much easier to kind of close my eyes and think back to that anatomy in the cadaver lab. I'm so thankful to these people who donated their bodies to allow us as medical students to learn the anatomy from the inside. Not only because I think it's such a powerful way to learn anatomy, but I also think it's a really humbling experience. And as a medical student, it gives you a real appreciation for another person's life and how we as doctors are able to play a small part and sometimes a big part in those people's lives. Now, I know that cadaver dissection isn't available to everyone, but thankfully with advances in technology, anyone with a computer or phone and iPad and an internet connection has accessed some really incredible 3D visualization tools. Learning anatomy from a set of 2D flashcards like this one, which I used quite a bit in my second year and not very much since then. So this is an example of what some of these flashcards look like. We've got detailed images of different parts of the anatomy all in 2D, which can be really helpful for testing your recall of different images and information. But these guys can only take you so far. My personal favorite 3D visualizer is this app that I have on my Mac and on my iPhone and on my iPad called Complete Anatomy. This thing is incredible. You can really zoom in to see all the different detailed structures inside the body at a level that is just honestly insane. And what I really like about it as well is that you can isolate different parts of the body and different parts of the anatomy to help you focus on what you want to learn. So for example, there's way too many arteries here. It's kind of clogging up this image. So I just go down here to the layers of arteries. I can slowly start to cut them back from the most peripheral to the most central and important. And if we want, we can even get rid of them entirely. But I like the beating heart animation. So let's just keep it in for now. Similarly, I kind of want to get rid of the nerves over here. So let's cut those out and I want to add on the muscles. So yeah, with something like this, you can click on any one of these structures and it'll give you some information about them. What I think is the most important for these 3D visualizers is that it shows you how these muscles move or how these structures move and what their use is. So here we have this iliacus and it's showing us hip flexion, showing you when the muscles contract and when they relax and how they move, which is incredibly, incredibly helpful. It also quite easily and simply demonstrates to you the insertions and the origins of these different muscles. Now, if you already couldn't tell the level of detail and the amount of structures that you can have in a 3D visualizer like this is just absolutely huge, way more than I would ever need to know for medical school. The good thing about this is that whatever you're learning in medical school, you can go to that lecture or that tutorial or whatever and then focus on that anatomy over here. So let's say, for example, we only want to learn about the anatomy of the upper limb. We can go over here to the side, click on the upper limb, get rid of the lymphatic drainage because we're not interested in that right now. What we're really interested in, like we talked about before, are the nerves. And then here, if we just click, we can see the median nerve and it's running right next to the brachial artery. That's right. And you can see how the nerve courses from the shoulder all the way down into the medial elbow and then down and innervates the hand like this. Now, personally, for me, these 3D visualizers have been really helpful in certain contexts. They're really good if I don't understand how the anatomy works from reading a lecture or a tutorial or watching a video. And I can go in here for myself and see how it goes throughout the body. But what I feel like they're really missing for me is a teaching element, the component where they explain to you what is going on, is clinical application, et cetera. Personally, I learned best when I'm being taught. I like someone to tell me what the important things are, to show me the important things, and then I can supplement that learning in my own way with my own other resources. I think it's really important to also talk about YouTube videos. This particular video about the brachial plexus, I come back to over and over and over again. And this is the reason I can draw the brachial plexus on a piece of paper and I can answer all the questions related to the brachial plexus in an exam. There's nothing quite like someone taking an extremely complicated topic and condensing it down and showing you only the most important things that you actually need to know. There's plenty of examples of videos like this on the internet and I encourage you to search out for them if you're struggling to understand an anatomy concept. Now, as much as I love the 3D visualizers, one of the main problems that I have with them is that although I could see everything really clearly and it's very cool to look at, it's missing the learning, the explanation and the teaching that I need to know about the anatomy that I'm seeing. As a medical student, you've got lots of work to do. You've got exams, assignments, your own learning, time on clinical placement. And for me, I want my studying to be as simple and easy as possible. And that's where the sponsor of today's video, Kenhub Anatomy comes into play. Kenhub Anatomy is an online platform that combines several effective tools to help you learn anatomy and histology. They make studying anatomy fun and easy with highly detailed images, quick and digestible videos, interactive quizzes which can be custom made to suit your learning needs and more. The content itself is organized into smaller studying units. This combines everything that I've talked about earlier in this video. You want really good images that you can see the anatomy. You want someone to teach you what the important things are about the anatomy that you're seeing. And then you need to do as many questions as possible in the form of quizzes to make sure you actually learn that information that you're studying. The content is organized into smaller studying units really focusing on the high yield information that you're likely to be tested on in your exams. Once you've watched the videos, examined the images and read through the information, you can then quiz yourself on the material that you just studied. Like I said, this is incredibly important as testing yourself and recalling the information like this can make sure that you're learning it properly and actually understanding the content itself. Their videos even have speed controls that you can play back the video at faster speeds and I'm sure you know just how big a fan I am of this feature. They've also got cheat sheets and reference charts which help summarize lots of useful information into a small geographical area, something that I've used extensively in my studying throughout medical school. They're in a small footprint which makes them easy to learn and reference and also you can use geographical and spatial association to remember different pieces of information on that single page. Kenhub has a ton of content completely for free which you can use to help you study and learn anatomy but they also have a premium subscription with additional videos, the ability to use quizzes and even access to their anatomy geeks which can help answer any individual questions or difficulties that you might be having with a certain topic. How cool is that? They're frequently adding new content and updating the existing material to make sure that you have all the best information right at your fingertips. If you're interested in using Kenhub to help improve your anatomy knowledge, click the link in the description down below for 10% off when signing up to any of their plans. They're a fantastic resource that I highly recommend and they even got a no questions asked seven day money back guarantee. Click the link in the description down below and get started today. Another very important thing when it comes to learning anatomy is to ask yourself, how am I going to be tested? The first thing I would suggest to any first or second year student is to have a look at what their anatomy curriculum is. You don't need to know all of this content but it's important to be aware of what is possibly going to be examined. This is the case for all exams but I find it particularly important with anatomy. The pace at which you're asked to learn all the different anatomy and the endless amount of structures is a lot and it helps to know what is going on and when. Once you know what the breadth of topics are that are possibly going to be examined, you need to know how it is that you're going to be examined. A lot of medical schools will teach either with cadaveric images, pro sections or dissections with pains to identify structures. Some other medical schools will use purely multiple choice questions or short answer questions. They'll bring your exams and more. There's no point in you spending all your time studying from cadaveric images when your medical school is only going to test you on illustrated drawings. It's also important to know how much of your exam is going to be asking you simply to identify structures i.e. do you know where this pin is pointing to in the arm or are they going to ask you more about the theory, the innovations, actions and attachments, origins, et cetera. Your school might even test you using only one resource so it's worth knowing what that resource is that your school uses and focusing on that. This might be one or a few specific anatomy atlases or it might just be multiple choice questions. You never know. Find out what it is and use that as your guide. How you're going to be tested is so important because anatomy is a vast, vast topic and it's incredibly easy to over learn the content. You might only be asked to learn about the important clinical applications of a certain part of the body's anatomy or you might be asked to learn every single little structure, its origin, its insertion, how it interacts with the structures around it, et cetera. So having this information in advance and knowing what to focus on is a lot of power here. It's so tempting to sit at your desk with a pile of anatomy atlases, flashcards and fake textbooks, 3D visualizers and online learning platforms. But this is so incredibly overwhelming and probably not going to make anatomy a very fun thing for you to learn. I think the best thing that you can do is to not overwhelm yourself. Choose one or two resources and stick to them. In medical school, I feel like we're already bombarded with so many different resources on how to learn the content. I personally found it the most helpful to stick to ones that include the best parts of all the different things that I've talked about. In this video, Kenhub is a perfect example of that. Some other things you can do is contact someone from the anatomy team at your university or medical school. This could be one of the anatomy demonstrators, a professor or a teaching fellow, however. They're gonna have all the information that you need and it's a good idea to be nice to them so that they can help you as you go along. After all, anatomy is a marathon, not a sprint and you need all the support you can get and you want to know where you can go to find it. A couple of mistakes I made along the way that I want to tell you about so that you can avoid making them yourself. The first of which is that anatomy textbooks are such a waste of time. They are really, really detailed with tons of information that you just don't need to know and you could easily spend weeks and weeks and weeks reading that anatomy textbook or watch one little video or look at one highly detailed image and get all the content you really need to know. Anatomy resources that are specifically geared to teaching you information in small undigestible chunks are the way to go and on top of that, you have to test yourself. Please don't forget the doing the questions part of learning. You can read and watch videos and look at images as much as you want but if you don't do the questions and test your recall of that information you're not gonna fully learn the material. Doing questions and doing quizzes is the best way to learn what you're studying and this doesn't only apply to anatomy and it doesn't only apply to medical school. This is how studying should be. Read the information, learn the information then test yourself using questions. All right, and that is it. I hope that this quick guide about learning anatomy has helped to give you some ideas on how to get started or at least how to make it a little less overwhelming. Hopefully you learned a thing or two and studying anatomy for you will be a little bit easier than it was for me back in the day. Like this video if you enjoyed it, subscribe for more and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace.