I Want to Help You Study for the Pilot PANRE

I’d like to ask you a favor. Now, this favor will be followed by me earning it; let me explain what I mean. I get that you’re studying for your Pilot PANRE and you are a little bit concerned. You’re concerned because you don’t know what to expect. Nobody knows what to expect, so that should be a little concerning to you. What’s the favor? I’m going to ask you to trust me. Even if you don’t know me, I want you to trust me. I have your best study interest in mind in everything that I share with you.

I’m going to earn it. I’m going to do everything I can to get you to learn everything you need to know to pass the 25 questions that you’re going to get every quarter for the next two years. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure you know the precise amount of information you need to pass with flying colors. More than that, I want to give you information to really make you understand content.

See, what’s happening with this Pilot PANRE is really a good thing. They want you to know the stuff you need to know to manage patients, not the crazy zebra stuff that used to be on the old PANRE. This is the high-end stuff, not polymyalgia rheumatica, not polycystic ovarian syndrome, not a pituitary tumor. That’s the kind of zebra stuff that you try to cram in for the test and you’d forget it the next day because it means nothing. This is the kind of stuff you need to know because it’s going to make you a much better clinician.

The Pilot PANRE is a Good Thing

I don’t care if you’re orthopedics, OB-GYN, psychiatry or nephrology. I don’t care if you’re in a specific field. You have to know what a melanoma looks like because as PAs, you may save a life by recognizing a melanoma. You may save a life because you go, “Wait, that lesion looks suspicious, I’m sending them to their doctor.”

Something like atrial fibrillation can present to your office asymptomatic. They come in, they have an irregular heartbeat, and the next thing you know, their heart rate’s going a little bit faster and you realize, “Holy crap, they could have atrial fibrillation.” Therefore, you refer them back to their primary doctor of cardiology, because you know that people with untreated AFib have a 10% chance of stroke per year. You could be the ortho, derm or OB-GYN PA that picks it up. The patient is put on the right medication and therefore they don’t have a massive stroke.

In both cases, you save lives. This Pilot exam is fantastic for teaching us walking-around knowledge.

Why Should You Trust Me?

I want to ask you to trust me to teach you exactly what you need to know – without going overboard. When I say I’m worthy of your trust, I believe it because I love teaching. I’m obsessed with it. Why am I obsessed with making information easier to understand?

It’s because I was a failure in high school. I didn’t graduate from high school in time; my grades were horrible. I have dyslexia. I don’t learn like normal people do and I was so disheartened in high school when I tried to study and didn’t get it. It made me feel like I was stupid and it sucked. It really hit me in the pit of my stomach. It gave me an identity, an identity as a guy who just couldn’t get it, who felt stupid. So I was a class clown. I was a fighter. I was someone who didn’t get it academically. I’d be teased at times by other kids or teachers.

So, anybody who’s struggling to learn, I’m talking to you. I’m talking to the specialty PAs, I see it and identify with it in the orthos especially, who just don’t get this walking around knowledge. I get it. If you’re a highbrow instructor or a student and you just get it at a very high level and you’re used to evidence-based medicine, I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to the people who struggle a little bit. I’m talking to the specialty PAs that need to know this general, clinical knowledge deep down in their gut so they really get it.

I want you to trust me that I’m going to bust my ass to make sure you get it deeply, and I’m going to earn that trust because this is now my full-time job. I pick up some ER shifts, but overall I’m a full-time educator. My whole goal, my whole passion, my whole obsession is to take complicated information and make it really easy for you to understand. That’s what I do. Don’t take my word for it. Look at some of my YouTube videos and look at some of the testimonials that have come from my courses.

Now once again, if you’re a highbrow PA, don’t come to my course. At the last board review course I taught in Buffalo, I had two ladies who sat in the second row who were a little bit snide and had negative things to say during the breaks. Other people at the conference came up and told me what they were saying. These two women were commenting that they don’t learn the way I teach. If you have that mindset, don’t come to my course.

If you really want to learn deeply, then I want you to be at my course. If you don’t mind learning from an edgy mnemonic, come to my course. I’m deeply passionate about teaching you, earning your trust and admitting when I don’t know the answer. As a PA of 21 years, I’ve worked in emergency medicine, hospitals and critical care. The emergency medicine that I worked is different than a traditional gig because I worked by myself. I’ve worked critical access emergency medicine, which means there was no doc. I had to learn medicine and pathophysiology at a very deep level because my patients demanded that of me.

I want to share that deep knowledge with you.