Principles of Addiction Medicine, 2nd Edition

Rating:
Summary: The best in its class
Review: This will be a comparatively brief - and thus inadequate - review. It is entered to fill a void, as this text can't go on being listed with this site without some commentary.

Addiction medicine, and by extension addiction psychiatry constitute fields in early development when placed against their clinical counterparts of surgery, obstetrics, general medicine. The illness states covered in addictions are quite nearly as old as civilized humanity, so the problem isn't want of exposure. It has largely been want of interest. Probably not until the past two centuries have there been: 1) sufficiently effective treatments as to excite the interest of physicians, 2) suficiently sensitive technical and social systems that the consequences of addictions are now clearly seen.

As recently as ten years ago, there was a child's fistful of texts on addictions: Norman Miller's, Marc Shuckitt's, a crude syllabus by the American Society of Addiction Medicine - intentionaly leaving out the many excellent monographs that actually created the field, by Stephanie Brown, George Vaillant, and others. With reformulation of a 1981 textbook on substance abuse, Joyce Lowinson and Pedro Ruiz and colleagues added enormously to the effort to provide a single source that could be used by graduate trainees in addictions. But generally, the larger the text, the greater the need to spread the responsibility across a greater number of authors; and the more difficult the task of cohering the topics and avoiding overlap.

In 1998, Allan Graham and Terry Schultz took the loose-leaf edition of ASAM's Principles and both reformulated and re-formatted it, resulting in this 2nd Edition. The editorial rigor shows in the careful dovetailing of topics and a reduction in redundancy, as well as in the successful accomplishment of comprehensiveness. I suspect that Dr. Schultz's own criticism would have been the need for more on neuroscience, and that will likely be remedied in the next edition. The assigment of only 4 stars of a possible 5 does not indicate significant disappointment; I simply do not think that it is possible to achieve a completely comprehensive and readable effort when working from so huge a group of contributors, on the first pass. I want to save the fifth star for the next edition.

This text is presently employed by the John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii, Addiction Psychiatry Residency Program as one of four core office references. This does not constitute an official endorsement by the University of Hawaii per se.

Rating:
Summary: The best in its class
Review: This will be a comparatively brief - and thus inadequate - review. It is entered to fill a void, as this text can't go on being listed with this site without some commentary.

Addiction medicine, and by extension addiction psychiatry constitute fields in early development when placed against their clinical counterparts of surgery, obstetrics, general medicine. The illness states covered in addictions are quite nearly as old as civilized humanity, so the problem isn't want of exposure. It has largely been want of interest. Probably not until the past two centuries have there been: 1) sufficiently effective treatments as to excite the interest of physicians, 2) suficiently sensitive technical and social systems that the consequences of addictions are now clearly seen.

As recently as ten years ago, there was a child's fistful of texts on addictions: Norman Miller's, Marc Shuckitt's, a crude syllabus by the American Society of Addiction Medicine - intentionaly leaving out the many excellent monographs that actually created the field, by Stephanie Brown, George Vaillant, and others. With reformulation of a 1981 textbook on substance abuse, Joyce Lowinson and Pedro Ruiz and colleagues added enormously to the effort to provide a single source that could be used by graduate trainees in addictions. But generally, the larger the text, the greater the need to spread the responsibility across a greater number of authors; and the more difficult the task of cohering the topics and avoiding overlap.

In 1998, Allan Graham and Terry Schultz took the loose-leaf edition of ASAM's Principles and both reformulated and re-formatted it, resulting in this 2nd Edition. The editorial rigor shows in the careful dovetailing of topics and a reduction in redundancy, as well as in the successful accomplishment of comprehensiveness. I suspect that Dr. Schultz's own criticism would have been the need for more on neuroscience, and that will likely be remedied in the next edition. The assigment of only 4 stars of a possible 5 does not indicate significant disappointment; I simply do not think that it is possible to achieve a completely comprehensive and readable effort when working from so huge a group of contributors, on the first pass. I want to save the fifth star for the next edition.

This text is presently employed by the John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii, Addiction Psychiatry Residency Program as one of four core office references. This does not constitute an official endorsement by the University of Hawaii per se.