ID Board Review/Book Introduction and Disclaimer

Introduction
With medical textbooks becoming increasingly - and sometimes prohibitively - expensive, there is a dire need for more cost effective alternatives. This is particularly true for medical residents and fellows studying for boards. Many are coming or have come to the end of their loans, and are faced with the grim task of paying off approximately a decade’s worth of debt from college, and medical school.

This medical textbook is aimed to be used by Infectious Disease (ID) fellows as they study for their American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) ID Board Certification Exams. It is written to be comprehensive, but succinct to facilitate easy reference, review, and consolidation of major learning points. For this reason, most topics will be covered in short bullet points, rather than long prose, and organized as simply as possible.

This also means that the textbook is designed specifically for the ID Board Certification Exam, and not as an extensive book for the field of ID. This textbook is structured on the ABIM ID certification "blueprint" published annually. The most recent version was published January, 2022. To clarify, this study guide is for the ID subspecialty in Internal Medicine (IM), not Pediatrics.

Everyone is welcome to contribute to this textbook. Citations are not required, but are encouraged to help determine reliability of information provided, as well as facilitate good research habits. Please use the appropriate format type for each page, found here: Page Formats and list any contributions you have made in the Appendix marked: Contributions.

ID Board Review
This work is only intended to be used to help with studying for a standardized exam, and not for delivering medical care. This work will focus on "classic" presentation symptoms, i.e. how diseases and syndromes are most frequently described in tests, rather than how they most often occur in real life. Sources that are appropriate for guiding and assisting in delivery of medical care include UptoDate and IDSA Guidelines.

Prefaces

 * i Title Page
 * ii Book Introduction and Disclaimer
 * iii |Book Table of Contents
 * iv Exam Content, Categories and Structure
 * v Page Formats