Anatomy is one of the messiest and trickiest subjects you’ll study in medical school. However, it’s a foundational component of your medical training, so gaining a deep and hands-on understanding of anatomy is vital to your success as a future physician.
Unfortunately, too many students approach anatomy the same way they approach other subjects. In this post, we break down 6 anatomy mistakes that every student makes.
1 | Seeking to Only Memorize/Passive Learning
In general, the biggest mistake students make in higher education is re-reading the textbook. This is a waste of time—especially when it comes to a subject as messy as anatomy. You need to find ways to interact with the material in meaningful ways so that the content sticks long-term.
Become more active in your studying by creating anatomy concept maps or by physically tracing your finger along with nerves, blood vessels, and muscles.
Don’t just read—quiz yourself on the material. Cover images in the book and use flashcards.
Take a step back to consider why anatomy is critically important for every medical student to learn. This will help you appreciate the bigger picture so that you don’t only memorize locations and names. Go the extra mile to understand how structures correlate with one another so that the clinical significance comes easy, even if you don’t know the exact disease process.
This is incredibly relevant to surgery, which you’ll need to rotate on no matter the specialty you choose. It can also be relevant to other medical fields, including internal medicine.
For example, consider how the biliary tree works. In case you don’t know, this is how the liver and gallbladder secrete bile. If an attending tells you that the patient has a bile stone in their cystic duct, your differential diagnoses will be slightly different than if their gallstone was in the common bile duct.
In the first case, the stone is only blocking the gallbladder, but in the second, the stone is causing a backup of bile in both the liver and gallbladder. The patient is going to present with different symptoms, and you will have different clinical findings when you do your physical exam.
Even if you don’t know this cold, if you know how the structures relate to one another, you can figure it out on the spot.
2 | Being Afraid of the Cadaver Lab
There’s no getting around it; if you want to be a doctor, you’re going to need to get comfortable around dead bodies.
You need to overcome the initial shock of seeing a donated body for the first time so that you can appreciate its anatomy. Keep in mind that this is what the person wanted; they donated their body so you can learn from them and provide better care in the future.
Generally, at the beginning of cadaver training, the head will be covered for several weeks until you become more comfortable. Some people are more uncomfortable than others, and some people even faint. Trust in the process, and do what you need to do to get over the initial shock.
Some people need to wear a mask while in the lab so the formaldehyde smell is not overbearing.
Fortunately, it does get easier, and you do get used to it the more you’re exposed to it. This kind of exposure is essential to helping you improve your understanding of the intricate inner workings of the body.
Towards the end of the class or later that day, look at multiple bodies. The human body is filled with anatomical variations. For example, roughly 15% of the global population does not have a Palmaris Longus muscle in their forearm. Take the time to check if any of the bodies don’t have one because that could be the body that is tagged on test day.
3 | Only Studying Alone
Do not only study anatomy alone. Utilize the Feynman technique, which helps you retain challenging concepts by teaching them to others in the simplest way possible, as if you were teaching someone with no prior knowledge of medicine.
Changing your role from student to teacher adds pressure to deeply understand the material. You’ll find you catch yourself before you say something that is incorrect. This will greatly reinforce what you already know and help you determine where the weak areas are in your understanding.
You can do this with classmates, roommates, or a friend who is completely non-medical. When I was in medical school, my friends and I would take turns drawing anatomy on the whiteboard and quizzing each other.
Another option is to volunteer as an upper-year student to lead tutoring sessions for younger classes so you can stay fresh on the material.
When I was a teaching assistant, I would volunteer to do the prosection of a cadaver for incoming classes. Prosections are the dissections the teachers do for the students to observe before they practice the same dissection themselves. This combines the Feynman technique with hands-on learning. It’s incredibly helpful if you’re going into a surgical residency or even internal medicine.
4 | Poor Quality Resources
It is absolutely vital that you choose quality resources, as some poor resources can actually be inaccurate. For example, I remember getting a test question wrong because the resource I was using had animated the tendons in the hand incorrectly. I remembered exactly what the resource had taught me, but the resource was wrong.
This is what happened. On the back of your hand, you have your extensor muscles, as they are used to extend your fingers or flex them into a fist. There are several of these muscles, but let’s focus on the tendons on the back of your index finger.
One of the apps I used had the extensor indicis radial to the extensor digitorum. Radial means it’s closer to your thumb while ulnar means it’s closer to your pinky.
This isn’t true. In real life, the extensor indicis is ulnar to the extensor digitorum.
I had mastered the material, but the material I mastered was poor quality, and I still got the question wrong.
This wouldn’t matter as much unless you’re in a surgical residency. If you are going into something surgical, the quality of resources matters even more.
You don’t want to create a “never event” by operating on the wrong muscle, bone or tendon. This is the type of stuff that gets your license looked at.
And on the subject of resources, do not focus too much on a single resource. Anatomy is a three dimensional space that takes time and unique viewpoints to understand. Collect a variety of quality resources and jump between various mediums to enhance your understanding in different ways, including traditional learning materials and real-life cadavers.
5 | Not Immersing Yourself
There are so many different tools for studying anatomy at your disposal today. Textbooks and text-based flashcards simply don’t cut it. Learn and reinforce your understanding of anatomy by utilizing 3D models, immersing yourself in the actual anatomy lab, and using apps.
There are VR apps for anatomy, and iPhone and iPad apps have the ability to manipulate in three dimensions. The three dimensional images are interactive and fascinating to look at.
When using flashcards, combine them with screenshots from various textbooks and lectures. Your memory is much more efficient and effective at retaining visuals than text-based information. Images are particularly useful for subjects like anatomy (and chemistry!).
When creating your own Anki cards, find an image for them. Even if the image is unrelated but still makes you think of the topic, utilize it. While this does take time and investment upfront, it will greatly reduce your learning time in the long run. Be generous with your images. Go on Google images, search for something relevant, and copy-paste it or screenshot it into Anki.
For example, if you have a diagram you want to test yourself on, such as the Kreb’s cycle, you can block certain segments of the image and create cards that way. The best way to do this is the Image Occlusion Enhanced plugin for Anki.
Learn how to install and use the Image Occlusion Enhanced plugin for Anki.
And don’t just look at the images and call it a day. Find practice questions and do as many of them as you can.
This example is a bit ridiculous, but there is a well-known MSK practice question about a patient who got stabbed between their first and second toe. The question is something along the lines of “which dermatome falls into that region?”
Well, very oddly, it’s the deep fibular (or deep peroneal) nerve. If you do enough questions, you will learn tiny details like this, which will help you go from being skilled with the material to having mastered it.
6 | Poor Anatomy Test-Taking
While these study tips are essential to mastering anatomy, they don’t mean much if you don’t hone your anatomy test-taking skills.
On test day, before you even start the question, take the time to orient yourself. If you get one minute on the practical exam, where you are looking at a tagged structure and need to answer a question about it, spend the first 5 to 10 seconds figuring out how everything is orientated. For example, is the body flipped over? Is the forearm pronated or supinated? Is the head in the opposite direction as compared to the previous question?
You can lose a few points if you don’t take time to notice you’re looking at the posterior compartment and not the anterior compartment or vice versa. Don’t lose points over silly mistakes.
Read each answer choice extremely carefully. There is a difference between “ilium” (the top most hip bone) and “ileum” (the distal portion of the small intestines). Sometimes, test makers will get tricky and have these subtle differences in answers to discern which students actually took the time to learn their anatomy in close detail from multiple sources.
Master Your Anatomy Comprehension
Anatomy is messy. It’s a different beast than anything else you will study in medical school. Embrace that messiness by diving headfirst into the world of anatomy. Quiz yourself, study with friends using the Feynman technique, use 3D models, and immerse yourself in multiple tools to truly gain an understanding of anatomy and how anatomy applies to your medical training.
For more tips, check out our step-by-step How to Study for Anatomy guide, and sign up for our newsletter for the latest medical school application news, guides, and study strategies.
