Originally posted on Reddit by u/shimmydoowapwap
Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/ocep0j/the_only_ekg_deck_youll_ever_need/
Where is The Only EKG Book You’ll Ever Need?
https://www.amazon.com/Only-Book-Youll-Ever-Need/dp/1496377230
I highly recommend this book as an alternative to Dubin’s EKG. I tried reading that book and doing the anki deck that accompanies it and I absolutely hated the book. Also, Dubin may or may not be a child diddler. For the above reasons, I set out to make my own deck based upon “The Only EKG Book You’ll Ever Need by Malcom Thaler.
Where is The Only EKG Deck You’ll Ever Need?
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1DHfYVXz7T6n7ROFa84tERfufTFtlq9I9?usp=sharing
Who is this deck for?
This deck would be most useful for those in their clinical years and definitely goes beyond what is needed for knowledge on step 1. Due to my own ignorance, I have no idea how useful the deck would be to anyone who is in residency. My school had us go pretty in depth on EKGs in our preclinical curriculum so if your school does the same it could be useful. Preclinical students could just focus on chapter one, the axis section in chapter 2, and the rate section in chapter 3 (93 cards in total) and that would be enough to set them apart from their peers.
This deck won’t magically make you an EKG god but it will give you the tools to actually be able to spot things in the EKG. The most important thing is reading lots of EKGs and I really recommend a website with practice strips such as ECG Wave-Maven (ECG Wave-Maven Main Menu).
What does this deck cover?
The deck is 585 cards organized by subdecks for each chapter and major subheading of the book. This includes the basics such as determining rate and axis as well as more advanced stuff like hypertrophy and bundle branch blocks. The organization has been duplicated in tags as well in case you want to make use of filtered decks.
I didn’t make cards for every single chapter if I felt like I didn’t need them (ex. there are no cards from the first 2 parts of chapter 1 because all of this is covered in Anking). The focus of this deck is on interpreting EKGs. This is not a deck for learning cardiac physiology, pathophysiology, or management. There are some cards that touch on these topics but for the most part I did not duplicate cards that are covered in much greater detail in decks such as Anking (ex. I did not make cards for stuff like ”STEMIs are full thickness infarcts” or cards for every drug that can prolong QT intervals).
There are some cards tagged “hardmode” for those who really want to know certain criteria cold. I know this isn’t pure zanki style formatting that sticks to the minimum information principle. However, when that 80 year old infectious disease attending who has a hard on for EKGs asks you to interpret the EKG, I have found it helpful to be able to recite all of the criteria it meets and which ones it doesn’t at once. If you find doing those cards to be too much of a pain in the ass you can obviously suspend them. The information in these “hardmode” cards is also broken up into much easier cards that are atomized.
Card Style
I predominantly used the Anking v2 note type with my own edits made to the card styling. I created a new note type so you can import this deck without it messing up the styling of your own Anking deck.
Cards are mostly short clozed deletions
Clozes are generally “two-way” for bidirectional recall
A handful of image occlusion cards (14 total)
The extras field has some diagrams from the book as well as text where the card was made from. Many of the chapters had summary tables at the end which are included in the additional resources field.