There’s not much I’m going to say here aside from the books I used and some studying advice. The reason being that Behavioral is actually not a conceptually difficult subject, it just needs to be given some attention. DO NOT brush aside Behavioral Science. I have been told this many times before myself and still I did not give it as much time as I should have. I was surprised to see how many Behavioral questions there were on my exam. I mainly saw questions on legal issues and how to deal with non compliant or difficult patients. I also remember having one question that dealt with a patient with different cultural beliefs.
The sources I used to tackle this were 1) Kaplan’s Lecture Notes 2) High Yield Behavioral Science by Fadem (3rd ed.) and 3) UsmleWorld Qbank.
A quick note about the Kaplan notes: There are a series of rules for dealing with patients and with legal issues towards the end of Kaplan’s Behavioral notes that I found amazing. The reason they work so well is because they give you a few solid principles with which to apply to an infinite amount of scenarios. For example, one of the rules Kaplan created for the physician-patient relationship is “Never pass off your patient to someone else”. I can’t tell you how many times I saw a behavioral question on the test with this as one of the answer choices. An example of this would be to refer your patient to a specialist or offering to help your patient see a counselor for their specific issue, etc. I remember in the past I would seriously consider this as an option(making the question more difficult for me). After reading Kaplan’s “rules,” the behavioral questions are less grey and more black and white.
