Comprehensive Review in Clinical Neurology: A Multiple Choice Question Book for the Wards and Boards

I don't ever write reviews; I consume them. But I found this book to be so superior to everything else on the market that I feel an obligation to share my opinion. Months before I started studying for the Boards, I surveyed people from my program who had taken the Boards in previous years to find out how they had prepared. Many people had used the purple Mowzoon book. While everyone said without fail that the "list format" made it hard to retain information, they found it useful from the standpoint of being comprehensive, if nothing else. I flipped through the book several times, but I was unable to convince myself that I would learn anything from it, precisely because information is arranged in a tabular format, with next to no context, and that's not how I learn. Everyone I talked to said they had also used NeuroPrep, the only widely used online neurology question bank out there. One person even said he had used NeuroPrep exclusively, knowing he didn't have the time to read a text book like Adams and Victor, or the attention span to benefit from a book like Mowzoon. Somebody else cited similar objections to Mowzoon and said she had used Ultimate Review (featured on the AAN website) because it had more text than tables. Incidentally, both of these people passed their Boards. I decided not to bother with Mowzoon, so I went ahead and bought NP and UR. As I started making my way through these two resources, I realized early on that UR is full of factual errors, as some reviews had correctly pointed out. How the AAN can endorse such a book is not the subject of this discussion, but suffice it to say UR is not a reliable resource. As for NP, I found the questions were mostly OK, but the answer explanations were entirely too cursory. Only a handful of explanations went into detail regarding why the other choices were wrong, while the majority offered no in-depth discussion. Many images were poor quality, with explanations that failed to point out the salient features of the image with arrows or arrowheads. I also found more than a few factual errors in NP. In short, NP is greatly over-rated. This pushed my hand to seek out other resources. I had used First Aid for all the USMLE Steps, and I liked their format, so I bought First Aid for the Neurology Boards. While I was doing an internet search for other books, I also came across Comprehensive Review in Clinical Neurology. There were no more than 3 or 4 reviews I could get my hands on, but they were all positive, so I thought it was worth a shot. It turns out it's by far the best resource for Boards preparation out there. While I was going through this book, I re-discovered my love for neurology, which had been forced into a state of hibernation through the tedium of residency. The book is arranged into 17 chapters, covering everything from critical care to psychiatry, as well as the pertinent basic science highlights for each subject. My particular weaknesses were neuromuscular, epilepsy, and child neurology, which I covered first. The questions are hard and thought-provoking, and require you to stay on your toes (e.g. all of the following are correct except...). The answer explanations are a pleasure to read--detailed, accurate, comprehensive, and long enough to be useful without dragging on and on. The images are fantastic (pathology, EEG, EMG etc.). Perhaps most important of all, the book gives you that sense of a comprehensive review, true to its otherwise uninspiring title. I learned a lot from this book, and I'm grateful to the people who put it together. It's worth its weight in gold. I just took my Boards, which means I don't have my score yet, but having read Comprehensive Review, I can at least say that I found the majority of questions on the actual test easy, to the point of being trivial. I was afraid that preparing for this exam was not going to add anything to my knowledge base, that it was going to be just another standardized test that you pass by memorizing certain buzz words and phrases, but I'm happy to say that I came away from my Boards preparation with a whole new appreciation for the beauty of neurology and a whole new confidence about my knowledge base. To make this a balanced review, let me add this. The book comes with an online question bank, which is all the questions in the book, except they're online. I tried using this resource, but I found the book to be more useful. If you select random mode, the online version brings up questions in--you guessed it--a random fashion. There are many question stems in the book, just like the second half of the actual Boards Exam, so occasionally you'll get a question like "based on your diagnosis in question X, what should be the next step in management?" You haven't seen question X, so you have no idea what the diagnosis is, or what the next step ought to be. I bet this is something they can easily fix, by making sure question stems come up first and the sister questions follow from the question stem when you're using random mode, but this feature is not there at this point. So if you feel you have to do computer-based questions to prepare for that aspect of the test, you might find this frustrating. We've all taken so many computerized exams in our careers so far that I don't think this is crucial, but if you must, you can go ahead and sink some money into NP to practice your mouse click. Your money may be better spent on First Aid, which does have very helpful diagrams, tables, and other visual aids. I cannot say enough about Comprehensive Review. It will continue to be a resource to me in the future.

I bought this book for neurology boards preparation after it was recommended to me by a friend, and I absolutely loved it. It is basically a question and answer book; every section has 30-60 multiple choice questions, followed by the answer key and then detailed answers. The answers are so well written and organized that it was a joy to read through them. The explanations are very clear and information is extremely relevant. I did not come across any incorrect information (that I could tell). As I was reading through it, I was learning all these interesting facts and concepts, that I wish I had read this book during my residency. I know that everyone has their own learning style so maybe this book just hit my style perfectly. I do not like reading textbooks, and in fact, my first purchase for the boards review was First Aid which was a complete disappointment (I used it and loved in the for the USMLE steps). So even though this book is not in an easily scannable, bullet point format that I typically prefer, it was so well written and easy to read that it did not feel like a textbook either. I typically learn well from questions banks, but I was too cheap to pay for Neuroprep, and this book provided well written questions as well.

I picked up this book at the advice of my senior residents, who were devotees of Cheng Ching's board review (many of them using it as their sole study source). While I used this as part of a larger study regimen that included topical review books geared at my weaknesses as well as an overall outline review book (Mayo Clinic), I did find it to be very helpful and probably the best question book geared at the boards. The book covers a broad range of neurology, from psychiatry all the way to child neurology and the bread-and-butter neurophys stuff. The explanations are concise yet detailed enough so the reader doesn't have to look up terminology frequently, and I found myself tabbing many of the pages for further reference. So why only four stars? The question stems are complicated at times to the point of being comical; many of the stems ask "Which of the following is incorrect" or "Which of the following is correct" and then many of the answer options have double negatives, further confusing the reader. I remembered an adage a prior supervisor had told me - "Tests should test your knowledge, not your test-taking skills"; at times this book felt more like a logic puzzle rather than a neurology test. I did feel that this book prepared me well for the exam, but wish that the questions had been better written. It is still vastly superior to other question books out there, which I sampled and didn't spend further time on. I can't speak as to using this book as your only reference, as I did not do that, and felt that the other sources complemented each other well. However, I would recommend this book with the caveat to the reader not to get frustrated over missing questions; the language of the question stems led me to miss more questions than I would have if the phrasing and question structure had been easier to understand.

This is by far the best question book currently out there for the neurology boards. I tried them all before I got this one and its superiority was evident immediately. The explanations are so thorough and clear that you can actually study from them directly. I started studying late in the game and decided I had to do questions rather than waste my time with enormously dense review books from which I would likely retain nothing. I also learn better by reading full sentences rather than bullet-points, so this was format great for me and I actually used this book as my main resource. I did all the questions and then repeated the ones I did wrong, and read all the explanations several times. I also used neuroprep and supplemented with a few other smaller review books on topics I needed to reinforce. I passed the boards and am not sure I would have without this book.

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