Physician-informed medical book reviews and clinical education resources.
I’ve been reading and annotating this book for close to a month now, and I barely scratched the surface in terms of absorbing the enormous amount of useful information stuffed into this relatively small 500 page handbook. Aids to Radiological Differential Diagnosis (2009), edited by Stephen G. Davies, is an extremely helpful handbook for interpreting … Read more
Stedman’s Medical Dictionary for the Health Professions and Nursing (2011) is relatively inexpensive and comes with a CD-ROM that will add about 60,000 medical terms to your word processor’s dictionary. I just did it and tested it out. It took seconds to install. My test words were conus medullaris, and Stedman’s got it right. There might be … Read more
“You cannot be a real general surgeon without reading this book.” – Schein (p. 27) Cope’s Early Diagnosis of the Acute Abdomen is one of the most famous, if not the most famous, single subject book in all of medicine. Now in its twenty-second edition, it remains an excellent monograph about the history and physical examination … Read more
One of the most important and defining aspects of a book is that its content is fixed between its pages. That does something to the mind: it makes goal-setting possible, making it possible to conceive of mastering a particular subject as defined by a particular book’s contents. This is particularly useful in a relatively slowly changing … Read more
Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, once said: Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgments … Read more
Toxicology Handbook (2011) by Lindsay Murray, Frank Daly, Mark Little, and Mike Cadogan is a straightforward guide to the management of numerous common and rare overdoses and toxidromes. Each toxin in described in terms of risk assessment, clinical features, investigations, management, disposition and follow-up, handy tips, pitfalls and controversies. The “controversies” section is particularly welcome. As Dr. Otis Brawley once said (paraphrased): … Read more
The format of this book is unique. A case scenario is described in vignette format. A question is posed, along with the answer. Then, a number of variations to the question are given, and answers are proffered for these as well. For example, a case of right lower quadrant pain is presented. Case variations include, (1) dysuria and … Read more