Minor Emergencies (2007) by Philip M. Buttaravoli is a book about exceedingly common, seldom taught, and frequently overlooked medical conditions. The book will teach you everything that you need to know about managing hundreds of medical problems including avulsed teeth, tick bites, bee stings, thermal burns and aphthous ulcers. Other conditions covered are somewhat rarer, but very interesting nonetheless. For example, you will also learn a thing or two about cheiralgia paresthetica which is pain around the thumb, frequently caused by tight handcuffs.
The most useful part of the book is the “What Not To Do” section at the end of each chapter. As far as I am aware, this is the only medical book in existence that employs this teaching method. After telling you everything that you need to know about managing a given medical problem, the book goes on to tell you how not to manage it. For example, in the chapter on epistaxis, the author cautions (page 113), “do not discharge a patient as soon as the bleeding stops, but keep him in the ED for 15 to 30 minutes more. Look behind the uvula. If there is active blood flow, the bleeding has not been controlled adequately.” Good stuff!
I really can’t think of any downside to this book. The text is lucid, the illustrations are wonderful and the content is stellar. It is a veritable goldmine of high-yield Board material for Steps 1, 2 & 3 and is just plain excellent. [Update: The book was updated in 2012. For a free sample of the 2012 edition, click here.]
I highly recommend Minor Emergencies to physicians and to ambitious medical students, and I welcome it to my list of the best medical books of all time!
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