Addicted to information | |
Australian medicines handbook. Adelaide: Australian Medicines Handbook 1998 (xxvi + 891 pp.). ISBN: 0 64635326 8. |
The editor of
the MJA asks book reviewers not to end their reviews with "This book should be on the shelves of every department library". He believes that readers might want to make that decision. Rightly so, but this book should be on the desk of every Australian prescriber. It addresses a long-felt need. The aim of the Australian medicines handbook is to provide an independent and up-to-date source of drug information using the best available evidence to support prescribing and dispensing recommendations. The book includes monographs on individual drugs, descriptions of similarities and differences between members of therapeutic classes, and brief outlines of the treatment of common problems. The drug therapy of disease is a complex biosocial process involving much more than prescribing of appropriate medication, and I was impressed that issues such as the development of individualised written action plans for people with asthma and the value of multidisciplinary care in diabetes receive a mention. Clearly, a publication such as this will date rapidly. To give examples, the World Health Organization recommendations on postcoital contraception have changed; an orally-active leukotriene receptor antagonist for the treatment of asthma is now available in Australia; and the principal findings of the UK Prospective Diabetes Study Group are out. The publishers intend to produce a new edition of the Australian medicines handbook annually, and an electronic version will be available later this year. The latter will avoid the principal physical limitation of the current product -- paper covers are insufficiently robust for a book that will be consulted regularly in a busy clinical setting. I hope that the publishers will address this in future hard-copy editions, and will also consider a reduction in price. The objective of the three sponsoring professional bodies should be to maximise the availability of this important publication. Timothy P Usherwood
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