No full marks for medical emergencies | |
100 medical emergencies for finals. Prasanna Sooriakumaran, Channa Jayasena, Anjla Sharman. Oxford: Radcliffe, 2006 (vi+ 272 pp). ISBN 1857757475. |
One of the tenets of emergency medicine is keeping an open mind and not jumping to conclusions, as this may lead to adverse patient outcomes. And so it was when I picked up this book on medical emergencies and recognised that none of the authors had any formal qualifications in emergency medicine. In fact, one is training in urology, one in diabetes and endocrinology, and the third is a lecturer in general practice. Emergency medicine is symptom-rather than disease-based. A patient does not present with hypoglycaemia, but rather with an altered level of consciousness. It is up to the clinician to rapidly work through an algorithm that gets to the diagnosis and allows urgent, life-saving treatment to be instituted. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few sections, this book is like many others about medical emergencies, where the majority of topics covered are disease-based, presupposing the doctor has already made a diagnosis. Despite my open mind, there were a number of inconsistencies in this book which began to irritate me. A glaring example is that some sections use the American term epinephrine, while others use the Australian/British term adrenaline. The layout of certain sections with clear headings (such as aetiology, clinical features, management and further reading), is useful and lends itself to a ready reference guide. Yet a number of sections, especially among the surgical topics, consist of just a page of bland text. There are also a few factual errors in the text. For example, adenosine can be used to recognise atrial flutter in narrow complex tachycardia rather than atrial fibrillation as is suggested in the section on narrow complex tachycardia. This book is, however, not completely without merit. I did learn one useful mnemonic for the causes of pancreatitis — GET SMASHED. Mind you, I am not sure how many scorpion bites causing pancreatitis I or the authors are likely to see. Keith D Edwards
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