Welcome to episode 530 of the Divine Intervention Podcast. In today's podcast, I'm going to be

considering a topic known as cognitive errors and the USMALEs. Cognitive errors on the USMALEs.

This is a super high-yield podcast for step one, step two, and step three. And where do many of these cognitive errors

come from? A lot of them come from what many people know as a heuristic. So what's a heuristic?

It's pretty much like pattern recognition. Many of us use this as medical students or as healthcare

professionals. You just use patterns in your mind and you just use that. you know, it's almost like test-taking in a sense.

Like, man, I've seen this pattern so many times.

So because of that, boom, I'm just going to jump to this.

That's a common kind of, that's basically like almost like a foundation for many of these errors.

You're just like, oh, I've seen this pattern before.

So it's got to be this. That's not always a smart way to think. It's smart to think that way,

but sometimes it can have some pitfalls. And one thing I'm going to say about these cognitive errors.

So I've said the first thing, like where they come from, you know, a lot of them are from heuristics.

But the second thing I'm going to mention here is this. The right answer on your exam is going to be based on the way the scenario is described. The right answer on your

exam is going to be based on the way the scenario is described. The same scenario described

one way may be one answer.

That identical scenario described a slightly different way may lead to a completely different kind of error.

So just be careful about that.

So let's walk through these errors.

Number one, what if they give you a question about a physician?

And this physician attended residency during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And this physician saw like 400 patients with COVID-19 during the pandemic.

...