Shogo Shirota
Tochigi Medical Center
I am honored to report that Dr. Kawaguchi and I won the first prize in the American College of Physicians (ACP) Doctor’s Dilemma competition 2019.
I have participated in ACP Japan Chapter(JC) since I was a medical student. Each year, I took a lot of interesting and interactive workshops, and got to know many outstanding medical students and doctors. Doctor’s Dilemma is one of the most interesting program, but I could not take part in it, because I was not able to get a partner.
There were the largest number, 35, of participating teams from various hospitals this year. In the Preliminary, we used smartphones to answer multiple choice questions. The questions are not so difficult, which made us nervous because losing even one question would be critical. We got 6th place and cleared the Preliminary.
The Final started after two-hour break. There were buzzer quiz at first, then more difficult, multiple choice questions from every areas of internal medicine. It was difficult to get point at first, because other team pressed the buzzer while we are discussing whether our answer was absolutely correct. Once we were able to select the multiple choice questions that every team had the right to answer but lost points with each incorrect answer, we could get almost all of the answers right. They were questions that were directly connected to what we do every day, and some of them we knew from MKSAP. That’s how we won the championship.
There are several reasons why we won this year. In addition to working up many MKSAP questions by ourselves, we see a variety of patients every day as a GIM physician. Moreover, we have various kinds of study sessions in our hospital which vary from day to day. These include clinical reasoning conference, learning how to make clinical question and search for it, introducing several papers in a short time, and so on. They made us deepen our medical knowledge very efficiently.
Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the attending doctors who mentored us, the colleagues and friends who congratulated us, and every staff who helped holding the ACP Japan chapter.
