Physician-informed medical book reviews and clinical education resources.
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question. E.E. Cummings I once overheard a medical professional ask a patient who had just suffered through a failed suicide attempt, “I bet you feel pretty stupid about the whole thing, don’t you?” Most reasonable people would recognize right away that this question was quite poorly … Read more
USMLE Step 2 CK Lecture Notes 2020: Obstetrics/Gynecology (2019) is an outstanding summary book for medical student-level obstetrics and gynecology. It’s slightly under 300 pages long and sparsely illustrated, but it contains excellent clinical vignettes, flow charts and tables that will help medical students prepare for standardized examinations that cover obstetrics and gynecology. Take, for … 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
Learning Radiology (2019) is an updated version of Learning Radiology (2011), which I reviewed elsewhere. Much like the previous editions, Learning Radiology (2019) uses a pattern recognition approach through which learners are taught how to recognize pertinent features of radiographic images. The images shown are generally very highly characteristic, and the captions help accentuate and … Read more
There are very few basics science books that make me wish I was back in medical school so I could learn the subject matter that way. Principles of Cell Biology (2014) is one such very rare book. Like most basic science books I’ve reviewed here, Principles of Cell Biology (2014) isn’t a what book but … Read more
Essential Biostatistics: A Nonmathematical Approach (2015) is a 200 page book that introduces you to most of the important concepts of clinical epidemiology and biostatistics. But instead of bogging things down with formulas and calculations, the book shows you how to use biostatistical concepts in practice. Take for example the concept of statistical significance. We … 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