here's the deal. you can just do questions over and over again and eventually ace the OITE (if you do enough questions). however, doing well on the OITE is not the real goal. as cheesy as it sounds, the real goal is creating a foundation for lifelong learning and passing the ABOS part 1. i am sure you are aware an entirely different group of people write the ABOS exam, so memorizing old OITE questions is not the end all be all.
here is what i did over five years. if you are not a textbook person (like me), you can accomplish this by reading main journals like JBJS, JAAOS, JOT, etc. if you read enough intros and discussions of papers over a period of five years, you will be amazed at how much you have accrued. this is even if the actual study you are reading is total crap. probably the hardest to do, but the most beneficial, is to really focus on reading every JAAOS article from the last 5 years. these are nice summaries of topics written by some of the people who actually write ABOS questions.
obviously this plan should be supplemented by case specific reading throughout your residency. for instance, if we were doing some wild hip revision, i would find everything i could in medline about how people were approaching these problem cases. that takes a mindless hook holding pgy2 case and actually gets you thinking about the real issues at hand. the science and theory often don't get talked about in the OR because everyone is so focused on the actual doing of the hands on procedure (i.e. here is how you get out a well cemented stem that you have to change).
the whole process of building your foundation is a daunting task. if you keep looking for a magic reading plan or someone to tell you what to do, you will be looking around as a pgy5 and crapping your pants thinking about the boards. the most important thing is do something everyday, just like exercising. whatever works for you is what works for you.
as far as the OITES go, 2 months before, abandon whatever your reading plan is and just start doing questions. look up the answers if you don't totally get it because some of the SFORP explanations are either wrong or don't really get at the meat of the question. also take the time to go through the self assessment exams and the HSS question book. if you do all of those and don't rock the exam, you probably have a learning disability. haha. have fun.
I know this is a reply to an old post but...what is the HSS question book and self assessment exam. I am in my last week of pgy-1 and want to rock next year's.
