It took a while to find good free - hey, i'm a student who is on a low budget! - apps for me as a medical student still in the pre-clerkship phase because most apps are made for the medical professionals. (even if you are not on a low budget, who doesn't like free apps?!)
Now every time I see a fellow med student with a new iPad, I would sit with him/her and download these apps that I found essential onto their new iPad (you're welcome guys XD).
I can't fit all of them into one post, so I will talk about the rest soon.
iTunes U
In case the name doesn't already give it away, it is developed by Apple. If you haven't already heard of and used iTunesU, its an awesome app but only if you have the right courses. After you download the app, you must subscribe to courses (don't worry they're free XD).
The app in itself isn't anything until you subscribe to courses. How do you subscribe to courses? Just click the "Catalog" button in the top left corner and TA-DAH! you have a whole world to learn from. Just browse through the courses, search using the search field or search for courses by topic. But since I am only talking about apps useful to us med students, I will only mention the apps which have eased studying the basic medical sciences.
Specific Courses
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Genitourinary Anatomy and Gastrointestinal Tract Anatomy: are in depth anatomy courses with relevant clinical anatomy, questions, flashcards, links to youtube videos and links to the related anatomy facebook page. These courses are un-frickin-fortunately not for public subscription. My anatomy professor has made them and it was for class subscription only. This means that if you were to search for them in the "catalog" you will not find them (although as I recall he plans on making it public soon). If they are made public (gotta go double check that with him), then you are lucky! They were life savers for me during the finals. I had everything about the anatomy topics I needed in one spot for revision AAAND to top it off, the topics were arranged according to anatomy regions (eg. in the gastrointestinal tract: upper GI - stomach and duodenum - small intestine - large intestine - rectum and anal canal - embryology...etc.)
Usefulness scale (i.e. my own invented scale of how I perceive the course and could be different for any of you :p): don't matter cuz they're not public yet :( but definitely a 10/10 if I were to give.
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2011 Medical Physiology - Renal: are mostly in-class videos of a professor at the East Tennessee State University during lectures explaining renal physiology. At first when I subscribed to this course, the videos worked just fine. Somehow when I needed them most this year, the video sound was muted and no matter how much I tried it didn't work. But maybe that is just a problem with my iPad, try it for yourself and see.
Usefulness: 6/10 (unless that's because of the sound problem on my iPad)
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Clinical Anatomy: anatomy videos by Stanford University. The ones I watched are quite old and were by Richard Snell. The explanation was done by drawing the anatomy while explaining on a blackboard.
Aspects of Anatomy: is just 1 video of the thorax and abdominal wall anatomy on a plastinated model by professor Peter Abrahams from Warwick University. You never know who may find it useful ;)
Usefulness: 9/10
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Anatomy and Physiology 1 & 2: are podcasts about both anatomy and physiology....yes the name wasn't obvious at all :p I haven't used these much except when I was in need of a fast revision of a concept. A&P 2 only has a few podcasts, it's A&P 1 that has the most.
Usefulness: 8/10
All of these courses were useful to me at one point - and they still have 1 year of pre-clerkship to prove their worth even more. Try them yourself and see!
