Physician-informed medical book reviews and clinical education resources.
Brain CT Scans in Clinical Practice by Usiakimi Igbaseimokumo MD is concise, sharp, brilliantly written, practice changing, and full ofnumerous helpful clinical pearls. In places, the advice is extremely straightforward: blood clots or tumours in the brain deep to the pia mater are called intraaxial and those outside the pia are called extra axial. (P. 26-27) … Read more
Atlas of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology (2007) by Wallace Peters and Geoffrey Pasvol offers a bleak and sometimes depressing window into the state of health, or lack thereof, of underdeveloped countries, particularly those in Africa. The names of the diseases and symptoms are fearsome and sometimes curious: dengue, blackwater fever, rabies, leprosy, bubonic plague and more. The … Read more
Human Sectional Anatomy: Atlas of body sections, CT and MRI images (2009) by Professor Harold Ellis is an exceptional anatomy book on many different levels. First, it shows you cadaveric sections that have been dissected in three dimensions to highlight some of the three dimensional sections of (what should have been) a two dimensional cut. It’s pretty hard to … Read more
Radiology and pathology are so intimately linked–with the former being essentially a field that is dedicated to the interpretations of shadows of the latter–that one would expect to find at least a few dozen comprehensive books about radiologic-pathologic correlations. There are, in fact, only a small handful of them in existence, with Comprehensive Radiographic Pathology (2011) … Read more
“If you think there’s another specialist who has all the answers, someone else who’s going to bail you out of trouble every time you have a question about ECGs, you are mistaken. That person may just as likely be wrong, so YOU must strive to become THE expert.” Amal Mattu MD, ECG Interpretation of STEMI: … Read more
Learners, particularly medical students and junior residents, sometimes have difficulty translating disease-based knowledge of pathology, pathophysiology and laboratory medicine to complaint-based real world medicine. They might know, for example, what “classic” acute heart failure is supposed to look like, but they might have some trouble wrapping their minds around the question of how to approach a patient who comes with … Read more
This niche handbook is based on a straightforward concept. For a given disease, it describes the imaging test of choice. As a bonus, the book also provides information about relative costs, harms, benefits and chest x-ray equivalents and so forth. So if you would like to know, for example, what the test of choice is … Read more