PranMD User Guide

PranMD helps you plan, capture, compress, retrieve, analyze, and review your Step 1 preparation.

It is not a medical content platform. It is a personal learning and exam strategy companion for your own notes, links, and reflections.

A business professional can approach Step 1 like a complex enterprise system: inputs, feedback loops, bottlenecks, failure modes, and performance metrics.

Your advantage is structured thinking. PranMD helps translate that advantage into medical mechanisms and exam behavior.

Start with normal function. Then ask what failed, what compensates, what symptoms appear, what labs change, and what treatment logic follows.

Facts matter, but they stick better after they have a mechanism to attach to.

Use Bootcamp for structured lessons, quizzes, QBank practice, and performance signals.

Use PranMD to capture your reasoning, build mechanism maps, analyze misses, and steer weekly priorities.

Use AnkiHub selectively to reinforce high-decay facts after you understand the concept.

Choose one mission. Watch or review the related lesson. Capture the mechanism in PranMD. Run a retrieval drill. Reinforce high-decay details. Then use Question Lab for misses.

End the session by writing one new rule you learned.

Use lessons to build the first mental model. Use Bites and quizzes to check recall reliability. Use QBank practice to test application under pressure.

Use performance views to choose deliberate practice blocks, not to judge yourself.

AnkiHub can help maintain and update shared Step 1 card ecosystems. In PranMD, the role of Anki is to protect details that decay quickly.

Use Anki after mechanism work, not instead of mechanism work.

Use selective unsuspension for facts that support a current Bootcamp lesson, a saved mechanism map, or a repeated Question Lab error.

If a card is not connected to current reasoning, it can wait.

Mechanism compression means expressing a topic as trigger, pathway, organ impact, symptoms, labs, and treatment logic.

The goal is a short script you can recall during a timed question.

Disease family thinking helps you compare related patterns: obstructive vs restrictive, nephritic vs nephrotic, primary vs secondary endocrine disorders.

This makes distractors easier to eliminate because you know which family the question is testing.

Question Lab is for your own reasoning trail: source, topic, archetype, confidence, time, missed clue, distractor, mechanism gap, and new rule learned.

You do not need the original question text to learn from the miss.

Common error types include knowledge deficit, reasoning failure, distractor trap, fatigue error, rushing, vocabulary confusion, overthinking, and premature closure.

The category tells you what to do next: learn, reason, slow down, rest, define terms, or practice elimination.

Weekly Review asks what improved, what confused you repeatedly, which mechanisms are weak, which error pattern repeated, and what next week should focus on.

This keeps your plan adaptive instead of generic.

PranMD readiness uses lesson completion, confidence, question accuracy, review consistency, and mission completion.

It is not an official exam prediction. It is a directional tool for choosing the next best action.

When everything feels hard, narrow the session to one mechanism, one recall drill, or one error pattern.

Low-friction progress beats heroic but scattered effort.

Allowed: manual links, user-created summaries, mechanism maps, error reflections, and links to official pages.

Not allowed: credentials, scraping, copied question stems, copied explanations, screenshots, or copyrighted deck/card content.