The Calgary Guide to understanding Disease

"Our Goals: To help as many medical students as possible learn medicine: not through memorization and regurgitation, but through reasoning and true understanding. By answering the questions of HOW and WHY diseases manifest the way they do, we hope to help students become better diagnosticians, prognosticators and treatment advisors as practicing clinicians. Our Mission: To create and maintain a medical student self-study resource that enhances students’ ability to understand and learn the connections between the pathophysiology and clinical presentation of diseases. What exactly is The Calgary Guide? The Calgary Guide is a compendium of flow-charts that link disease pathophysiology and disease manifestation. It is not a collection of summary notes, not a compiled list of answers to exam questions, and it contains no paragraphs or pages of text. Instead, the diagrams in The Calgary Guide connect the pathophysiology of diseases with their clinical findings and complications, explaining concisely and coherently the links in between. Our flow-chart format allows the pathophysiology to be explained in a step-by-step manner, facilitating student understanding of disease manifestation in a logical way, minimizing confusion. The content is written in simple language, understandable to most students with a first-year undergraduate biology background. Everything about the disease is on one slide, making the content concise and readable. Faculty at the University of Calgary review all material to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. The Calgary Guide makers are not out to make money. We have ensured that our resource will be free at the point of access. The Calgary Guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) License. This means our work is freely out there for use, and the only strings attached are that if you want to use or re-adapt the work in any way you must cite us as your source. Who we are: We are a collaboration of students and faculty members at the University of Calgary who are passionate about learning, understanding, and teaching medicine. The student authors, reviewers, and editors of the Calgary Guide have worked hard on this resource and we are proud to be sharing with you our understanding of how diseases manifest. We are not doing this for money and we will not pepper your screen with ads. We wanted to do this because it’s something good, something meaningful, something useful to fellow students, all the while reinforcing our own understanding of diseases."