Physician-informed medical book reviews and clinical education resources.
Rheumatology Made Ridiculously Simple (2020) is a concise and clear overview of rheumatology. The book starts with a discussion of how to evaluate patients with joint pain, and then proceeds with a detailed overview of the diagnoses and management of all the important rheumatological diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), the spondyloarthropathies and … Read more
In a rather crowded field of exceptional books on electrocardiography, Basic and Bedside Electrocardiography (2009) stands out as one of the finest—perhaps among the top four or five. The book, written by a cardiologist with a lot of experience teaching cardiology to medical students and residents at an academic center, is quite different from most … Read more
No one in the medical community has so far been successful at stopping the epidemic of terrible endocrinology books that has been plaguing the medical community for decades. I won’t name names but have a look at what’s out there and you’ll be stunned: the market is full of bloated endocrinology tomes that have many … Read more
The current edition of A Visual Guide to ECG Interpretation (2017), much like the previous one (which I reviewed elsewhere), is a marked-up atlas of important, must-be-able-to-interpret-correctly electrocardiograms. Almost every important ECG that you can think of can be found here: coronary ischemia and occlusion, hyperkalemia, Brugada pattern, Wolff-Parkinson-White pattern, Wellens sign, arrhythmogenic right ventricular … Read more
At some point in their educational career, medical students need to successfully navigate the transition from microbiology and pharmacology, —i.e., bugs and drugs—to infectious diseases, that is, diagnosing and managing infectious disease syndromes and distinguishing them from their noninfectious mimics. This transition is challenging for many for several reasons. The main one is, in my … Read more
The Painless Guide to Mastering Clinical Acid-Base (2017) is a 180-page introductory acid-base biochemistry book. The book is very clear and well written and hits on all the major aspects of acid base disorders in the context of their underlying biochemistry and pathophysiology. For example, the biochemistry of ketoacidosis is discussed in fine, precise and … Read more
Atlas of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology (2019) 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 images are equally striking … Read more