Bates' Guide To Physical Examination And History Taking

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: Still looking for a good physical exam book
Review: This book was written for no one in mind. It reads as a single run-on sentence from page one to the end. You cannot learn physical exam from it (or from any other book -- you simply have to practice) and Bates is a rather mediocre reference if you need to find out how to examine this or that.

Physical exam is a dying art and I'm yet to find a semi-decent modern text on the subject.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but maybe you'll want better.
Review: This is an excellent and thorough text on the physical exam. The only problem is that its based on "the way things have always been done" instead of emerging controlled trials evaluating H+P techniques objectively. You might consider purchasing one of the new evidence-based medicine physical exam texts that are beginning to pop up (Ask your docs about recommendations). Preview them first, because not all of them teach the actual techniques or present the differential diagnosis of findings as well as Bates. They do, however, actually include numbers (percentages, Likelihood ratios, etc) to tell you how sensitive and specific (read how useful) these methods really are. These numbers will be critical to you later in evidence-based practice (which is not what all physicians now practice) in order to determine the pre- and post-test (lab, X-ray, etc.) probabilities of your differential diagnoses.
Buying an evidence-based text now would save you from having to buy both like I did.