Ready-made PowerPoints for Your Case Presentation

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Or how to see a Harvard professor's lecture without going there

Opening scenario

You are an intern. You have a case presentation tomorrow and you don't have a clue where to start. Your senior told you "don't worry, it's easy, you're gonna be fine". He did not tell you how exactly "easy" or "fine" you would be if you had not even started. So, you are Dr. Honest and your case report is about endocarditis. Well, how about if you can go to Google.com and download 50 case presentations in full color and with all the tables and figures.

What about if you are Dr. Dishonest and after you download the perfect case presentations by Dr. Unknown from Harvard, you just put your own name on the title slide? The rest of the presentation is perfect, so why change it?

All these are possibilities and the choice is yours. You have rights AND responsibilities. Just bear in mind that "you can fool some people for some time, but you can't fool all the people all the time". We strongly discourage plagiarism which is both unethical and illegal.

The web is enormous. There is more information on Google.com than any library will ever be able to collect. A lot of it is really good, professional and evidence-based.

You can download ready-made presentations on any topic in medicine and 80-90% of them are useful. Some universities upload all case presentations, grand rounds, journal clubs, lectures, etc. to their web sites and access is free.

Let's say you want to read about the use of PET scan for early diagnosis of lung cancer. It's easy to find 20-30 PowerPoint presentation on Google. You can attend a lecture by a Harvard or an Oxford professor whenever you want and at your own pace.

How to do it?

Go to Google.com and type in the search field what you are looking for, e.g. "endocarditis diagnosis".

The result shows up in about 0.25 seconds and you have 560,000 pages to browse through. It is a job for a month, right? No, this is not what you need. At the top of the page click on "Advanced Search." On the right side you will find a field called "any format". In the pull down menu, click on ".ppt" (the file extension for Microsoft PowerPoint presentation), and then hit "Google Search".

A whole new world will open for you. The world of all the lectures ever published online for endocarditis. Now you just click on the link and the presentation will open in PowerPoint program within 1-2 minutes depending on the size of the file. Alternatively, you can save it by choosing "Save As."

Now you can compare your presentation to what other people have done, and have some new ideas and inspiration.

SOAP note

Status of an Intern presenting a Case conference

S: In distress, confused.

O: Shaking, vitals unstable, SpO2 100% on RA due to hyperventilation

A:
Acute fear --> but can get better!

P:
Download PowerPoint presentations using the Google approach described above.
Check them out.
Make your own presentation.
After doing a great job presenting, you can upload your to Google Presentations or SlideShare.com to share with others.

Created: 01/20/2004
Updated: 11/09/2007