Barry Schoenborn

A lot of pathology and Physician Assistant Exam questions concern the small and large intestines. Here you see conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), ischemic bowel, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), celiac disease, and diverticulitis. Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a diagnosis of exclusion after other conditions have been ruled out.

Grasping some technical math basics can simplify everyday situations faced by many professionals and even non-professionals, including having to solve word problems, calculate tips, make change, or match American and metric measurements.Simple steps for solving word problemsWord problems aren’t just on school tests.

When you're preparing to take the PANCE or PANRE, you may feel like you have to know an endless amount of information. How will you ever remember all the details of so many diseases and conditions? Here, you can review some useful mnemonics that will not only help your recall as you prepare for your physician assistant exam but also improve your clinical acumen.

Using real-life math can simplify everyday situations. Math comes in handy every time you take a trip, go shopping, or do projects around the house.Estimating taxes and discounts when shoppingWhen you go shopping, you often encounter discounts and sales offers that change the price of an item. In addition, many states in the United States charge sales tax, and if you’re shopping abroad, you may face a value added tax.

No matter what initials you have after your name (RN, CNA, PA, and so on), you can bet you’ll see math on a daily basis if you’re going into (or are already in) a career in the medical field.Grasping some medical math basics — such as how to break down medical dosage problems into steps and use conversion factors — can simplify everyday situations all health care professionals face.

A common scenario you deal with clinically and for the Physician Assistant Exam (PANCE) is inadvertently finding a lung lesion on a chest radiograph. You’re looking for something, and bam! There it is. What do you do about it? You assess the lesion on the radiograph: Check the other lung findings to make sure that you’re just dealing with a pulmonary nodule.

Many household projects require that you be able to calculate area or volume. Whether you're painting your kid's room, mulching your flowerbed for the winter, planting grass seed in the spring, or tackling any other project for which you need to find out how much of something you need to cover, knowing how to figure area and volume is a time- and money-saver.

The Physician Assistant Exam will expect you to have an understanding of cardiac conduction disorders. Take this example. Rich has been around awhile and has taught both medical residents and physician assistants. Before that, he was a med student. Rich knows that when it comes to cardiology, two of the biggest causes of consternation, angst, and pain are answering physical-exam questions and identifying heart rhythms.

The spirochete-related diseases can be debilitating and disabling to the max if they aren’t detected early, as the Physician Assistant Exam (PANCE) will expect you to know. The spirochetes are Gram-negative bacteria. Rocky Mountain spotted fever is also covered, which is caused by a Gram-negative coccobacillus, not a spirochete.