Hey everyone,

I just became a member of the forum today and was just diagnosed with ADD last week. I'm on medicine (adderall xr), but it is not having the profound effect that I was hoping for. I think my expectations may either be too high or that I just haven't found my right med and dose yet, which is very likely.

Anyway, I'm a first year med student and was hoping that there are other med students out there who are a little bit further along with their treatment plan. I've been able to compensate for my ADD in college and did well on the MCAT, but I'm having trouble now due to the sheer volume and denseness of the material. The nuanced details that never seemed important before are now the majority of what we are expected to learn. Strangely, I have done okay (about average) up until this point, which includes biochem, anatomy, histology (okay, I sucked that up), physiology, etc.... It hasn't been until this course, which combines immuno, micro, and pharm, that I have been having massive concentration issues. I suppose this is because these are some of the more tedious aspects of the first two years.

If anyone can share experiences or stories or tips or encouragement or just a "there's more of us out here" post, that would be immensely helpful.

Hello constantdreamer! I' m not studying to become a doctor but I´m attending an education program that is similar in content to what you read in med school. I have worked my way through 2 years of it and it has been hard , but I've managed pretty well. I don't know if I can give you any tips you've probably heard of them so many times. What I use to really "penetrate" a great volume of reading is to use the learning objectives of the course. You can ask for learning objectives for every chapter you need to read. For every chapter I read I check out that I've learned what's in the objectives. Sometimes the objectives aren't very well formulated but then I ask the professors what they really mean. I try to think of my education as a nine to five job. In the beginning of my education I didn't do that and it meant flunking exams.....:( . I just try to do a little bit of this work every day nowadays and it has worked reasonably well.
English is not my native language but I hope you can understand what I mean. Good luck!