Bates' Guide to Physical Examination & History Taking (Book with CD-ROM)

Rating:
Summary: Really Good
Review: Could there be a better way to put phsyical exam in a book? The pictures are great and the step by step approach is great for people just learning the physical exam or people that need to brush up on specific aspects of an exam.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for chiropractic students
Review: I am a first year medical student and use this book in our physical diagnosis course. I found this book easy to read with good illustrations. Diagrams were useful in understanding the text. I found the heart sounds CD to be extremely useful in understanding the cardiac cycle and how it relates to heart murmurs. I haven't seen other physical diagnosis textbooks but I can say that this one is very user friendly.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Physical Examination textbook.
Review: I am a first year medical student and use this book in our physical diagnosis course. I found this book easy to read with good illustrations. Diagrams were useful in understanding the text. I found the heart sounds CD to be extremely useful in understanding the cardiac cycle and how it relates to heart murmurs. I haven't seen other physical diagnosis textbooks but I can say that this one is very user friendly.

Rating:
Summary: Decent
Review: I am a second year med student. This guide is okay. It is very basic, but has some great tables. There are better resources out there for physical examination skills though.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for chiropractic students
Review: I used this book along with Mosby's Physical Examination book and easily passed my Physical Diagnosis class in chiropractic college. These two book also served as excellent references for Parts II, III and IV of the national chiropractic boards. I also found Dr. Leonardi's National Board of Chiropractic Part II Study Guide: Key Review Questions and Answers, to be an excellent source for the boards. I also found Leonardi's Part III Study Guide and Part IV study guides to be right on the mark. These books helped me with passing the boards. Bates Book is needed as a great building block for learning Physical Examination--Heart, head and Neck, Chest and lungs, abdomen etc.

Rating:
Summary: Errors in book, lacking correct information
Review: I would not recommend this book. On techniques of examination of the Nose and Sinuses this book shows and tells you to use an otoscope with an ear speculum to examine the nose. This is wrong. The correct way to examine the nose is with a bivalve nasal speculum and a penlight or a headlight. Also an ear speculum should only be used to examine the external auditory canal of the ear. When Dr. Barbara Bates was the author of this book this correct information on the nasal examination was in the book. Dr. Bickley should not have taken correct information out of this book and inserted wrong information. Also this book does not have posterior rhinoscopy(examination of the nasopharynx with a nasopharyngeal mirror), indirect laryngoscopy with a laryngeal mirror, anoscopy, and sigmoidoscopy. I recommend Textbook of Physical Diagnosis 4th ed. by Mark Swartz, M.D. for Physical Diagnosis courses not Bickley's book.

Rating:
Summary: A doctor without this book is missing a lot ...
Review: It is a book worth keeping all the time around you, in the clinic, in the ward and everywhere. I being a homeopathic doctor felt that in the beginning the text teaching almost everything needed to hunt for the clues, symptoms and signs to pin-point the problme and later serves as a reference. This new edition has many added features along with the all previous ones. I usually didn't need to consult anyother book while using it.

Rating:
Summary: Errors, errors, and more errors!
Review: This book at one time was good I am told, but the 8th edition (2002) is now outdated with many errors. The CD on heart sounds which is included is insulting to medical students. The book has terrible photographs which make the patients look jaundiced or cyanotic. I am sorry I bought it. There is no question that Swartz's book on physical diagnosis is the best. Swartz has a great free CD on the complete physical exam which is included with the book.

Rating:
Summary: Errors, errors, and more errors!
Review: This book at one time was good I am told, but the 8th edition (2002) is now outdated with many errors. The CD on heart sounds which is included is insulting to medical students. The book has terrible photographs which make the patients look jaundiced or cyanotic. I am sorry I bought it. There is no question that Swartz's book on physical diagnosis is the best. Swartz has a great free CD on the complete physical exam which is included with the book.

Rating:
Summary: Just there is no better book yet
Review: This book is good just because I could not find any better book.
It has good colored pictures but pictures are for extere pathologies, there is not much practical pictures. What is also missing is key observations. Yes there are some warnings for key observations but not enough. observations that are in the margins of the book should be the scope of the book. Explanations are very broad, for example says "look for asymetry or discoloratio, etc but it does not say very often than what. it helps for note taking but does not help much for diagnostics.there are some tables that guides you but those tables are very extensive.May be I was expecting more that what it should be.