The Rx Bricks Podcast
Your High-Yield Med Content on the Go
Build your foundation of medical knowledge and close your learning gaps brick by brick. We’re turning our high-yield multimedia learning library, Rx Bricks, into an immersive audio experience—so you can turn downtime into high-yield learning time.
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Latest Episodes
In your reading about thyroid diseases, you have run across a number of symptoms, physical exam findings, tests, and diagnostic strategies. You have also encountered the diagnostic overlap between the various syndromes and diseases like hypothyroidism, hyperthyroidism, Graves disease, and thyroiditis, which can be confusing. How can you keep all this straight? The purpose of…
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People who play tennis or golf, or even those who get wrist or shoulder pain from working on their computers, likely are familiar with pain around the joints of the upper extremity. Is it rotator cuff tendonitis or subacromial bursitis? Tennis elbow or olecranon bursitis? Similar conditions can affect the lower extremity: jumper’s knee or…
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*** Rx Bricks Season Pass https://go.usmle-rx.com/brick-season-pass/ *** Diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) is one of the most dreaded acute complications of diabetes mellitus. It is a medical emergency. When patients with DKA arrive at the emergency department, they are clearly ill, with vomiting, diarrhea, disordered breathing, and mental status changes—even unconsciousness. Up to 2% of patients with…
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*** Rx Bricks Season Pass https://go.usmle-rx.com/brick-season-pass/ *** Some of the most dreaded chronic complications of diabetes mellitus come from injury to the blood vessels. Such injury may lead to blindness, renal failure requiring dialysis, and early death from heart attacks. These complications develop slowly over years and can be divided into two groups based…
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Cushing syndrome is a cluster of clinical features resulting from exposure to excess glucocorticoids (hypercortisolism). Most of the abnormalities in Cushing syndrome are caused by high levels of cortisol itself, but an accompanying excess of androgens and mineralocorticoids like aldosterone may also add to the syndrome. Cortisol is produced continuously in the adrenal gland. It…
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Getting the air to our lungs in the first place can be challenging enough. How do we get the oxygen out of the air once we have it in our lungs? This huge job comes down to one tiny unit: the alveoli-capillary unit. In this brick, we take a look at how the exchange of…
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Type 1 diabetes mellitus, previously known as juvenile diabetes, is one of the most common chronic diseases in childhood. The pathophysiology of type 1 diabetes begins with autoimmune destruction of the insulin-producing β cells in the islets of Langerhans, thus leading to insulin deficiency. A crucial role of insulin is to increase glucose uptake into…
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The ovaries are a pair of reproductive organs located deep in the pelvis of the female body; they contain the female gametes, the ova. As in many other organs, cancerous and benign tumors (neoplasms) can arise there, but most are malignant. Such tumors are distinct from ovarian cysts, although some ovarian neoplasms may have cystic…
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The central nervous system (CNS) comprising the brain and spinal cord is an incredibly complex part of the human body, so it is no surprise that sometimes things go awry during development. The various anatomic anomalies that result can be so severe as to be incompatible with life, such as when most or all of…
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A neoplasm is the abnormal growth of new cells, sometimes called a tumor. A variety of tumors can grow in our bones, and luckily more of them are benign (noncancerous) than malignant (cancerous). What causes these tumors? We usually don’t know, though we do know that most malignant bone tumors are secondary, with cancer spreading…
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