Review: Mosby’s Anatomy and Physiology Study and Review Cards

Before I write a review for Mosby’s Anatomy & Physiology Study and Review Cards, I need to relate my connection to these cards with my massage therapy career and the different licensing changes that have taken place in my state (California) and throughout the country over the last two decades.

When I graduated from massage school in California, getting a license to work professionally required registering with each individual municipality or city.

I lived in Pasadena and I did chair massage there, so I needed a Pasadena license.

I worked in a spa in Santa Monica, so I needed a license there.

I worked for another chair massage service at the Staples Center, so I needed a Los Angeles city license.

This added up to a lot of bureaucratic paperwork that would take hours to fill out and weeks to return, and over $1000 in licensing fee costs each year.

Since that time, massage licensing has become statewide in California, and throughout most of the United States, creating more consistency and allowing massage therapists that move out of their state (like I did) to easily relocate and relicense in their new state.

 There are two main tests that will fulfill the knowledge requirement for licensing and will allow you to work in most states if you have passed one of those exams and have the required number of hours.

(Of course, it depends on the state, so that is something you may need to research on your own or I will write another post about later.)

One of those texts in the MBLEx and the other is the NCBMB.

I tried to take the NCBMB in Illinois about 8 years ago.

NCBMB took the fee I paid to take the test and then told me I didn’t have enough anatomy hours at school (from a decade earlier) to take the test, but then they kept my money. 

This happened in 2011 while I was living in Chicago and a spa was waiting to hire me.  It took weeks (that I spent studying, by the way) for them to tell me I didn’t have enough hours.

That is dishonest and wasted my time, money and resources, so I do NOT advocate taking the NCBMB test at all.

So I never took that test and I have been working in Vermont at a massage therapist which does not require that test, but I am interested in getting licensed in other states again.

I have had job offers in New Jersey which I have had to pass up.

I also have had several job offers in California (even though I am on the East Coast) and old clients that want me to work on them while I am out there visiting friends, so it makes sense for me to move forward with this MBLEx exam now.

The next few posts I have will be about studying for the exam.

Honesty, it is a bit overwhelming. 

I have a precise 3D awareness of the structures of the body and body systems (including energetic systems emphasized in Eastern Medicine). I understand contraindications and most importantly, how massage affects the body.

But the number of vocabulary words I need to learn is well into the thousands and that is what I am going to have to focus on.

Before I created a plan for myself, I was a bit all over the place.  I paid for one program that was just online practice exams but for learning the answer to these specific questions would only give you a small chunk of the system or area of the body that I needed to learn, so it didn’t connect the information in my mind in a cohesive, holistic, connected way.

I tried then to support the online tests with books, but there was so much vocabulary that it drew focus away from the in-depth description of biological functions that I would need to be clear on in terms of verbiage in an exam setting.

So here I am, reverting to the first item I purchased, and in this third attempt to prep for a massage exam (the MBLEx), I have decided to do three phases of prep work, starting with vocabulary, especially anatomy and physiology vocabulary, through the use of flashcards.

I want to note that though I am saying this is my “third attempt at prepping for the exam”, I have never actually taken the exam, and it is quite likely that if I took it today I would probably pass it today, but I want to make sure I am fully prepared and I also enjoy using the medical terminology rather than the layman’s term (I prefer saying “scapula” instead of “shoulder blade”) and so brushing up on these words is quite pleasurable to me.

The Quick-Learning Strategy of Flash Cards

The first thing I bought back in 2011 were these anatomy cards by Mosby. 

I paid about $45 for them but when I just checked on Amazon I saw that they were under $10 used condition.

I have always been a fan of flashcards. That is how I studied everything in college. I would make flashcards.

I would carry 10 flashcards with me and take them out +10 times per day (like when I was waiting on line or waiting for a bus).

I tried to do that with these cards, but each card has on average about 10 terms and there are 320 cards.

So you really cannot do it that way because the concept of learning 10 full cards in a day is that the mind takes and retains the most information in 5-10 minute learning segments (about the time it takes to wait for a subway in New York).

With the Mosby flashcards, that is really ONE flashcard a day if I do it the way I did it in college (with 10 card/10 things to learn) and I would need almost a year to finish all 320 cards.

When I opened up the deck of study cards recently, I discovered a card I had not noticed last time I used the cards which presented a different method for learning called The Leitner Method.

With this method, you make three piles with the cards: 

• The first pile is for cards that are the most difficult
• The second pile is for cards that I sort of know.
• The third pile is for cards that are easy for me.

Then you go through all of the cards and divide them into piles.

The ones that are difficult you go through every day.

The ones you sort of know you do a few times per week. 

And the easy ones you may want to run through every week or so.

As you get better, you move cards into the “easy” pile.

About These Specific Cards by Mosby

I like these cards.  I have nothing to compare it to in terms of other pre-made physical flashcards, but I am very happy with this deck.

The graphics and pictures of the body are fantastic and the explanations are clear.

I feel that if I learn 80 percent of the terms of these cards I will be able to pass the MBLEx, because I already have strong knowledge regarding body systems, physiology, pathology, massage, ethics, and all the other areas covered on the test, that that will give me a very strong basis to pass the exam.

I guess if I had one criticism it would be that there is too much information on each card.

Maybe they should make cards with less information but make more of them so that a student using the Leitner Technique could sort them with more precision.

But overall ok with their presentation and I feel that The Leitner Method for sorting the flashcards is giving me a clear visual cue as to how ready I am to take the exam. 

When most of the cards are in the ‘easy” pile I will sign up to take the test.

How This Fits Into My Overall MBLEx Study Plan

As I mentioned earlier, taking the MBLEx can be a bit overwhelming because of the number of terms presented in the exam.

It is also overwhelming because there are so many online and offline resources available and creating a study plan can be a challenge, as can choosing the correct materials.

So after I got started on the Mosby Anatomy & Physiology Review Cards, I decided I needed a few materials to draw in all of that information into a less random formation.

Flashcards, using the Leitner method can become quickly out of order and while the 320 card deck has some continuity in the subject matter if you keep them in order, that continuity will not be maintained using the Leitner Method.

So I also included a few books to draw all of the information together and a few online resources to test that my MBLEx prep would get me the scores I needed in the real exam.

I will be getting into these other resources in future posts.

Finally, as I mentioned earlier, I purchased so example exam test questions and that will be the final step in prepping for the MBLEx exam.  I will be talking about that in future posts, too.

Conclusion

The Mosby Anatomy & Physiology Study and Review Cards are a good ‘step one’ for prepping for the MBLEx.  

The makers of the MBLEx test say that the questions that future massage therapist test-takers usually score the worst on are questions about anatomy and physiology, which also is a big chunk of how they score the MBLEx.

Therefore, it makes sense to focus on anatomy and physiology, and then move on to the other subjects on the test once that portion of knowledge is solid.

Honestly, if you are not into flashcards, the experience of going through hundreds of them every day could get a little boring and dry, and therefore you may want to start with Anatomy Coloring Books or something like that (I will be writing a review for that soon, too), but if you like studying with physical flashcards, these Mosby Anatomy & Physiology Study Cards will be a good choice to get you started. 

Links mentioned in this post:

Mosby’s Anatomy and Physiology Study and Review Cards

Anatomy Coloring Book