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Medical Software

A Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) - be it a Palm OS or a Windows Pocket PC - without software is rather like a car without...um...stuff in it. There are some nifty little applications that are of use to the astute medical student. There's a big package that includes everything you will ever need (from the BNF to Clinical Evidence and more), but it costs in the hundreds. We're going to try and see if they'll do a deal for nice students. In the meantime, here are a few to keep you going:

{In alphabetical order...}

Cardiology

>Palm EKG Although they are cunningly disguised as 'EKGs', they are still 'ECGs'. A free collection of commonly encountered rhythms for your perusal.

Clinical - General

>Diagnosaurus Sounds like a child's toy, but this is infact a neat little differential diagnosis application.

>Skyscape - all their software >Skyscape - Archimedes (free) A collection of over 300 software applications and e-textbooks. The majority aren't free, but there are some useful ones in their collection. Also has an service to get updates on healthcare/pharmaceutical related matters, although this caters more for the US-market.

Archimedes is a free on-line medical calculator from Skyscape. It supposedly has 70 of the most commonly used formulae in medicine. I'm not sure about the 'commonly' bit (I honestly thought there were only about 3 formulae that existed in medicine) but this package is still pretty useful.

>Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (for PDAs) Buy it now. Excellent, cheap, and...um...excellent. It's the whole thing, and it's fully searchable at the click of a button. You can even look intelligent whilst using it on a ward, rather than having to un-subtly look everything up in a bright yellow book.

>MedCalc Maths in the workplace is occasionally as unpopular as smoking. Make life easier with this handy utility, for all your medical calculations. This covers everything from anion gaps to statistical analysis.

Drugs & Therapeutics

>Epocrates It's all in American, but still useful.

>British National Formulary (BNF) Very pricey. Only for the financially unimpaired.

Dermatology

>Dermmeister Pictures of things going wrong with skin. If your dermatology knowledge stretches as far as 'um...it's a rash', then you need to use this.

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