If youre a medical student or other medical professional/trainee, and you feel that you cant quite wrap your head around acid-base physiology (or you find that you often cant recall key concepts/equations/etiologies/reference values related to acid-base disorders), this app was designed for you.
As a current fourth-year medical student, Ive personally experienced the challenge of studying acid-base disorders. Acid-base physiology is a complex subject, and Ive seen many medical students (including myself) struggle to both fully grasp the concepts and, later, to apply them in clinical practice.
The "Acid-Base" app for iPhone and iPad was created primarily to help medical students (but also other medical professionals/trainees) not just solve acid-base problems with ease, but also gain a firm grasp on the concepts behind them. The app was designed to pull together all the definitions, explanations, equations/values, etiologies, and algorithms necessary to take a student from knowing nothing about acid-base disorders to knowing what is expected of a medical school graduate. That information is in "The Basics" section of the app.
The remainder of the app is geared towards solidifying understanding via repetition/practice:
- The "Step-By-Step Analysis" tool walks the user through every single step (with explanations) of working up a suspected acid-base disorder.
- The "Quiz Me" tool randomly generates sets of laboratory values that represent acid-base disorders, and the user attempts to select the correct disorder or set of disorders from among 5 choices (multiple-choice style). Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulties are available.
- The "Solver" and "Calculators" sections provide useful tools for those students/professionals who already understand the basics, but just want to "check their answers" or avoid performing calculations manually.
- The "Settings" page allows users to adjust various "cutoff values" that the app utilizes in its interpretation of lab values. For example, the user can change the range of "normal" for the main lab values, and one can also adjust the cutoff value for an "elevated" anion gap.
I hope you enjoy my app! My hope is that it can help to transform acid-base disorders from a subject dreaded by medical students to one that is interesting, easy to learn and understand, and (maybe) even fun. Please let me know what you think, whether you love it or you hate it! Updates to the app will happily be made as needed.
Special thanks to two kind and generous attending physicians who reviewed my app and provided useful feedback: Dr. Mills in pediatrics, and Dr. Strange in pulmonary/critical care medicine. Thank you!