Hello, med students. My name is Zach Olson and thank you for downloading this episode of the EM Clerkship Podcast.

I got an email a while back from a student and she wrote, Hey, Zach, sometimes I feel unprepared when it comes to looking at imaging.

I know it's difficult to summarize without visuals, but I was wondering if you could share some

tips that will help us look like rock stars. Also, love your podcast. I feel like I'm already

doing so much better on this rotation compared to the last one after listening, Alex.

Well, thanks for the email, Alex, and again, sorry too.

We were in this whole trauma series, so it's been a couple months since you wrote me this,

but I haven't forgotten about you.

You are not alone.

You're definitely not alone when it comes to having some difficulty understanding how to analyze images.

Looking at this stuff isn't easy.

It wasn't easy for me.

I don't think it's easy for anyone.

I think part of the reason is because at a lot of the places where we're training,

we have radiology residents and radiology fellows and radiology everybody.

And so we get reads on all of our images.

And we don't necessarily, we aren't forced to read them ourselves.

And I think that's part of the reason why people just in general having more difficulty with this now,

compared to our attendings way back in the day when they had to do all their own image interpretation.

But my advice for you is focus on learning how to interpret a chest x-ray, because by far, the chest x-ray is the most important image study that you're going to be expected to interpret as a student.

You might get asked about some other stuff.

Someone might show you a head CT or something,

...