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Theory and Science looks like a basic science paper and behaves like a clinical one. It does not ask you to recite a pathway. It gives you a child and asks what the pathway predict...

The first line of a paediatric vignette gives you an age, and candidates read past it. That number is not scene-setting. It determines the normal ranges, the differential, the dose...

The Foundation of Practice paper tests whether you can look after children safely, not whether you know rare syndromes. Candidates who revise the exotic and neglect growth, develop...

The antibody is not the diagnosis. Rheumatology questions are built to punish candidates who reach for the serology first, and to reward those who describe the clinical phenotype b...

Respiratory medicine hands you numbers before it hands you a diagnosis, and the numbers are algorithmic. Candidates who interpret them in a fixed sequence answer questions that loo...

Two traps sit at opposite ends of this exam. One is treating everything as though cure were still on the table. The other is treating nothing because the patient is dying. The spec...

Neurology is the specialty where naming the disease first is guaranteed to mislead you. Answer two questions before you name anything: where is the lesion, and how did it evolve. T...

Nephrology is the second most derivable specialty in medicine. Candidates who memorise result patterns struggle. Candidates who reason from the physiology reconstruct the answer, a...

Four variables decide almost every treatment question in oncology, and candidates routinely establish three of them. The one they skip is treatment intent, and it is the one that d...

Candidates reach for the organism first, and it is the wrong end of the problem. Infection questions are solved by three variables in order: what syndrome is this, who is the host,...

This is the one specialty exam where the answer the guideline gives is frequently the wrong answer. Geriatric medicine asks what should be done for this whole person, and single-di...

The European Specialty Examination in Gastroenterology and Hepatology covers two specialties that share a curriculum and almost nothing else. Most candidates are strong in one and ...