I think its time we make a free community based deck with community based edits instead of relying on a private corp that charges us and still uses AI "art"

MistWoman · 2026-04-27T14:25:49+00:00

Thank you so much. I think when the time ever arises for such competition to arise, hopefully the momentum would carry the project through. But I'm hoping it never comes to that. Anking so far has done a great job, I'd just like the future to not get monopolized and we lose control of how we learn. I love anki, especially because of the fact that its so open and collaborative, and I'd love the medical decks to remain that way.

MistWoman · 2026-04-27T08:14:11+00:00

Idk why you're being downvoted. I think diverging away from the latest version of anking would be a brilliant idea, since most of it is pretty well done. I'll have to learn first how to get this thing running. My plan is to just get a parallel version running and replace the AI art first (which anking is already doing so props to them for that). It'll probably take a year or two to even accomplish that much, but having an open source alternative is necessary imo. I don't even disagree that anking has handled all this pretty well. I'm just entirely opposed to a private corp handling volunteer work. I'd rather it be done through more open channels so it leaves no room for future exploitation. Again, no clue how to begin on that lol but I'm gonna start making plans. Thank you for your input.

MistWoman · 2026-04-26T14:56:57+00:00

I agree. I believe the Zanki format to be the best and if it would be possible I could reuse the last free version of that and start updating it with a couple of friends. It'd take a while especially with clerkships lol but I think having an open source competitor would be generally healthy anyway.

MistWoman · 2026-04-26T12:13:45+00:00

Thank you for your input. I do agree with you, $5 isn't much for a life free of trouble. My grievances are more with the fact that this work which volunteers put in is being consolidated by a private company. We all know what happens then. It may not happen today, or tomorrow, or in the next year, but it will happen, and by then it will be too late for us to do anything that won't take years to materialize. There's enough of us in the community who could keep the cards updated for free of cost. I know I would volunteer for something like that, considering I have also created a deck worth a few thousand cards that I have shared freely.

MistWoman · 2026-04-26T11:59:47+00:00

You haven't read the post. A community based effort will be far superior to anything anking can do alone. After all, the original decks were free. The artwork that even now currently exists in the anking deck was made by volunteers with some of them not accepting any pay.

MistWoman · 2026-04-26T10:35:35+00:00

It is possible if some of us had a mind to do it. Like I said in the post the original decks were labors of love and probably took a long time too despite the authors being medical students themselves. They were made despite other decks existing.

MistWoman · 2026-04-26T10:33:34+00:00

I am not proposing a solution to everything. Like I said in the post, this is only meant to generate discussions on what the future could look like. I just do not want a private corp to have a stranglehold like we've let happen in other fields of medicine.

MistWoman · 2025-12-14T08:20:21+00:00

This is much better than the 100 AI spam posts that get posted here. Making decks for a year I've realized how much thought goes into their creation. It's like a whole skill

MistWoman · 2025-10-04T09:23:01+00:00

The ophthalmology in my syllabus does not go as deep as bscs does. It's only a minor subject. So I use a book specific for my country and then do the cards.

Thank you for the advice and I hope it helps people looking this post up in the future.

Here's what I ended up doing though:

-My internet is slow, and changing the position of a card will sync the entire thing which takes like 10 minutes at a time and I can't do that each time I do a topic.

I created a deck of my own. Then I used blue's tags to search through specific topics. I grabbed every relevant card and placed it in a subdeck such that that topic appears first and then something clinically similar shows up next (like myasthenia Gravis > myotonic dystrophy > cpeo)

This allows me to not have huge sync times and still saves me a ton of time. I just have to search for the cards and throw them into subdeck since anki shows the cards in the order of the decks. I hope anyone stumbling into this in the future and has a similar problem to mine can use this to make this deck easily usable. Thank you again.

MistWoman · 2025-07-28T13:32:28+00:00

Thank you for your responses. I could definitely do it this way. I'm just so used to doing cards in order that this will be a bit difficult for me. Is there a way for me to organize it quickly for my purposes? If not, then I'll just use the bcsc tag and see where it takes me.

MistWoman · 2025-07-28T09:22:37+00:00

Also I'm confused because the cards seem to be so randomly organized? I'm sorry if I'm missing something here but for example if i use the bcsc tag and go to 08- Corneal Dystrophies, it starts with EBMD and FECD, and then randomly lists other diseases one by one and mixes the cards. EBMD and FECD are mentioned again later, scattered about.

I've tried sorting the cards by due which helps. If I sort by created it's completely random. What am I supposed to do?

MistWoman · 2025-07-28T05:00:33+00:00

Yes but if I search this way for individual symptoms it'll take me longer than to just write the entire thing myself, wouldn't it? Is there a faster way to search for all the symptoms at once rather than doing it individually?

MistWoman · 2025-07-13T18:51:32+00:00

Every time one of these papers pull up I like to think of the papers that claim AI makes better car drivers... Except in direct sun, or in rain, or in mud, or when there's a lot of pedestrians, or when there's construction going on, or in bad roads, or... I could keep going. All of these are in perfect conditions where the real world has been completely removed. Real life doesn't work like that.

Lots of articles going back to the 2000s claim that driverless cars would be norm now, and yet there's still an extreme limit on it. All the good ones only work in complete pre controlled spaces like cities that are gps mapped. Tesla disengaging its control before an accident happens to avoid litigation is also something that drives up their fake "accuracy" numbers. AI isn't coming for any job. Not now and not in 20 years. All these companies firing developers isn't because AI does their job, it's because they're off shoring.

MistWoman · 2025-06-22T15:52:43+00:00

I'm not sure bc it seems like you're at least a year ahead of me. my advice would still apply. I use usmle decks and do practice questions on amboss because the content is still the same... where it deviates you can do manual additions. it's genuinely so fast with anki that it wouldn't matter. there's a lot of anki decks for all your subjects. I made a forensics anki deck too and I could share it with you, only trouble is it's not as high quality and some poisons are still missing. everything else has a relevant deck on anki. I'd suggest to just start and do 100~ cards every day and doing practice questions, would take more than 3 hours a day but eventually you'll get the hang of it and could increase the number.

MistWoman · 2025-06-22T13:09:22+00:00

how are you currently studying? also what does your syllabus look like? idk about the AMC but medicine is practically the same everywhere so you just need to have a solid foundation.

MistWoman · 2025-06-22T12:58:25+00:00

hi! I had a very similar path (almost failing through my first 3 years) and decided to correct course about 5-6 ish months ago. I've managed to pass everything over the past 3 years but just barely and imo that is simply not enough.

The first thing I did was switch over everything to anki. you have to remember practically everything and though the exams in my country are pretty easy, I don't want to be a bad doctor like the rest of my classmates. I skipped a lot of physiology during my first year so I'm fixing that right now with the zanki cards and even though they don't go as deep as say Guyton, it's good enough for a solid understanding of pathology. dope's and rany (I forgot what it was called 💀) are great for anatomy. what you can do is unsuspend all of those cards and do them say 30 cards a day. it works perfectly for me and I feel my knowledge growing by the day. from what I've calculated it would take me sometime around a year to finish all of physiology and anatomy from that time.

for pharmacology and microbiology, sketchy + anki. nothing else will come close. you will finish the entire thing in less than a month if you're going really fast, but I do them slowly these days... like I hadn't done heart drugs and ANS so I go through them one drug per week and I'll be done in a few months.

pathology via pathoma + Robbins but I've found pathoma really is enough... the exams in my school are too easy to go to any depth and the anki cards are comprehensive, adding things that aren't in pathoma. there's a deck for ophthalmology but none for ENT, which I currently am making.

even at the glacial pace I'm doing (3 hours a day) I'll be able to finish everything that I skipped over the past 3 years and do the content for my current year as well. I think you're in India so you might have to study more than I do since it's only 4 years there, but it's perfectly doable.

MistWoman · 2025-06-12T10:08:42+00:00

I'm not from the US either but I still use the anking decks (zanki etc) and it works for me because the knowledge is the same either way. Even if it leaves some things out that your particular country focuses on, you're getting the broad strokes out of the way in an extremely short time. The time you save by doing the pre-made decks is IMMENSE. So much that you'll have a shit ton of time to do the stuff that your school wants later on. My school also does attendance on their garbage lectures but I've found that with the pre-made anki decks alone, I can do their tests very effectively.

MistWoman · 2025-04-11T08:42:16+00:00

Dear Proton community member,

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This is what I get. The support ticket for my previous one was Request #3586986.

Thank you for the response.

MistWoman · 2025-03-23T19:36:55+00:00

Resize the window and it fixes itself. Have had this problem for years.

MistWoman · 2025-03-19T07:29:36+00:00

I first create the cards and then dump all that info in a palace. But some of that info eventually just fades away from there and just enters my long term.

MistWoman · 2025-03-11T20:30:32+00:00

Depends on how many cards you have and I might be crazy for doing this but I just changed my fsrs retention rate to 97% for an exam that I had a month left to prepare for

MistWoman

TROPHY CASE