The foundations
Mechanism, pathology, pharmacology — and the image work most students postpone until it is too late to fix.
3,514 questionsUSMLE · Step 1 · Step 2 CK · Step 3
Everything the USMLE asks of you.
One subscription.
7,695 questions. 16,003 image and 9,190 text flashcards. Full-length mocks built to the official blueprint. All three Steps — Step 1, Step 2 CK and Step 3 — in one subscription, $50 a month.
Free, for every Step: 100 questions · 50 flashcards · one full 160-question mock exam. No card.
7,695
Questions you can study — plus 2,560 held back so your mocks are never questions you have already drilled
25,193
Flashcards — 16,003 image, 9,190 text. The image deck most banks never built
16
Full mock exams — three of them free, one for every Step
The principle
A wrong answer should be a real mistake — not a decoration.
Most banks write four wrong options because the format demands four. Two are usually obvious, and dismissing them teaches you nothing at all.
MDcells is built so that we cannot do this. Distractors are pulled only from a map of documented confusions, each stored with the finding that distinguishes it.
- Each distractor is evidence, not imagination
- A diagnosis, drug or mechanism that is actually mistaken for the right one — not a plausible-sounding word chosen to fill a slot.
- Each explanation teaches the discrimination
- Why the answer is right, why every other option is wrong, and exactly what you would have to see for one of them to be right instead.
- We would rather write fewer questions
- Thin concepts are skipped, not padded. A bigger number on a marketing page has never passed anyone's exam.
The image library
Sixteen thousand cards. The image library the others never built.
Radiography, CT, MRI, ultrasound, histopathology, microscopy. Not decoration inside a question — a library you drill card by card, until visual diagnosis becomes reflex rather than recall.
Diagrams, not specimens — the real figures live inside the cards, and 25 are free on every account, no subscription required.
Inside the cards, every image is a real clinical figure — radiographs, scans and slides, scheduled by spaced repetition so the ones you keep missing keep coming back.
The journey
One subscription. The whole way through.
You should not have to buy the same platform three times in order to become a doctor once.
The clinician
Diagnosis and management under time pressure. The Step that now carries the weight in your application.
2,210 questionsThe physician
Judgment and management, sat during intern year — when you have the least time and no patience for a new platform.
1,971 questionsPricing
Fifty dollars a month. For all of it.
And a free tier generous enough that you can judge the work before you spend anything.
Free
See the real work first. Then decide.
Most free tiers are a locked door with a window. This one isn't. You get real questions across every Step, a spaced-repetition deck, and a complete 160-question mock exam — the same one a paying student sits. Enough to know whether the work is good, before you spend anything.
The subscription
One subscription. Every question, every card, all three Steps.
Not $50 a Step — $50 for all of it. The complete question bank, both flashcard decks, and the tools that make them work together: spaced repetition driven by your own mistakes, and targeted practice on the systems you're weakest in. One price, from your first day of Step 1 to your last of Step 3.
Mock exams
Mocks draw from their own set of 2,560 questions.
A mock score means nothing if you have already drilled the questions. So 2,560 questions — about a quarter of the bank — are held back from the study bank entirely and used only in mocks. You cannot practise them. You cannot filter to them. They exist to be seen once, cold.
Available to anyone with an account, subscriber or not — a mock is an exam, not a study deck.
- No card to begin
- Cancel in one click
- The free tier never expires
- Consumer rights never waived