Critical Care On Call

Rating:
Summary: very basic, completely not worth your money.
Review: This is meant to be a pocket book on ICU problems. it is essentially a list of topics arranged alphabetically. the information is very basic, and unlikely to be of real help.

There are too many handbooks like this these days in medicine. little things with the same bare bones purest common sense information any 2nd year student will know. You get the feeling authors just grab some standard textbook, copy out some of the main sentences in the common diseases, slap together a table of contents, paste some colourful covers that prasie the book as if its Gods gift to all doctors, and then throw it into the market. It makes me positively ill.

So few people put real effort in writing anymore.

As far as handbooks in medicine go, the classic enduring masterpiece is, was and will always be the Oxford handbook of clinical medicine. That is the medical handbook that should be the standard that all so called medical authors should strive for. Clear, beautiful, witty, thoughtful prose. REAL prose - they actually speak to you. When you read the book, it's like you are speaking with a senior resident who has been through that terrifying call before, and knows what to do when faced with that patient draining blood from a GI bleed. Or that really really sick mom in respiratory failure from Guillaine Barre. Sensible approaches to patient presentations, without neglecting any step - what do you look for in the history, in the exam, what labs would be worthwhile, how to put in that IV, how to think it through. The information is REAL, telling you when this approach might help, and when doing it X way will not be helpful. No mindless sentences copied from other terrible books. They never neglect art at the expense of the science. I wish Tony Hope and Murray Longmore and David thaler wrote handbooks for critical care, and neurology, and cardiology...

The best Crit care handbook today is probably the Mass general one. The Irwin and Rippe handbook is not helpful. Just a rip off from the big textbook, telling you the sort of stuff you can read in any basic textbook, but which in the middle of the night is not what you want to know. The marek evidence base book is better, but suffers from a serious defect too - it ridiculously claims to be Evidence Based, but lacks even a single reference!

Oh well... we may yet hope.