Oxford Cases in Medicine and Surgery

This is a top book. I am not surprised it won the Richard Asher Award from the Society of Authors.If you want a book for rote learning, this will do, but its real achievement is capturing the thrill of the chase in diagnosis.Let's face it, pretty much anyone can treat patients once they have a diagnosis, the difficult bit is getting the diagnosis right in the first place. Sometimes it is easy, sometimes it isn't.No book cannot teach you to diagnose, but this book comes closest in capturing the wisdom of many experts and packaging it in an accessible and non-pompous format. You can pick it up and just read it and learn good stuff. I also use it as a teacher to help me teach better.Improvements? I am a bit of an anorak, so a bit more of a tip of the hat to Bayesian theory, pre-test probability and Likelihood Ratios - if anyone can explain these nicely, you guys can.

In my few years as a medical student, I have never come across any book that teaches a medical student to be a amazing diagnostician the way that this one does!As a medical student that recently began clinical years at hospital, most of the textbooks out there are organised in terms of medical conditions. This is great in its own right and something that we ought to know. However it is very difficult to take this information and apply it to a patient presenting in hospital. Patients don't present with already determined diagnoses such as peptic ulcer disease but rather arrive with some anomaly they've noticed such as hematemesis. Often when I see a patient at hospital, I try to take a condition that I have read about and apply it to the patient. This is obviously silly because I will already have a diagnosis in my head and try to essentially 'make' the patient have this condition! In fact many of us medical students do this rather than approaching the patient objectively and working towards a diagnosis!In fact we need to use the patient's presenting complaint and eliminate the potential possibilities to achieve a diagnosis.This book is such an excellent resource that I really wish I had purchased from the beginning of third year. It approaches patients based on what they present with and takes a beautiful step but step approach on how to achieve a diagnosis! And it does this so elegantly by explaining the reasons why certain investigations are done and understanding what the results of these investigations will actually mean! And the case approach stimulates on the spot thinking which consultants often do to us on the wards! Its a really excellent resource! And the reading is legible (text size) and very easy to understand that you don't feel overwhelmed! You actually feel like you are learning and retaining information almost subconsciously!I really love this book and has made me more confident in the wards when seeing patients and answering those terrifying questions that consultants often drill us with! Many thanks to the authors!

This is a really comprehensive textbook for clinical medicine, with a novel layout. Instead of being sorted by disease, the conditions are arranged by presenting complaint. This makes it good for revising for practical exams, where you will be asked questions based on the presenting complaint, and this gives a good level of detail around each condition and investigations etc...On the other hand, it makes it difficult to look up a specific condition, as there is no information given in this format. I used this book for a few months, and then instead bought Rapid Medicine which I much prefer. That said, I am sure I will dig this out around exam time.

This book is simply perfect for anyone trying to make sense of medicine. Whilst understanding and thinking about the mountains of pathology and basic science inherent to a medical degree is admirable in itself, medicine is an inherently 'doing' thing. As an F1 doctor, you are presented with someone's problem and you have to figure out what to do about it. Typically this means:1) Choose the most important symptom.2) Have a set list of things that are known to cause this symptom (i.e. a differential)3) Investigate each possibility in the list, narrowing it down to your diagnosis (i.e. clinical reasoning)4) Treat the diagnosed disease/illness.5) Feel good about a job well done.Luckily, this book is structured around this exact process, with each chapter based on a symptom that comes through the door (e.g. chest pain), rather than pathological process as per most books (e.g. inflammation). Thus you are guided through the typical presentations/cases you'll see as a junior doctor, in the above process. Crucially, the text explains WHY you are doing what you are doing, not simply the OHCM list style of learning (which equally has it's place as a quick reference).Although it is admittedly fairly basic, I simply cannot recommend this book highly enough to any medical student (or interested bystander), on the other hand I can't quite figure out why there aren't more like it! Huge respect and congratulations to the authors on a well thought out (and sadly, unique) book.

This book is very cleverly written. By dividing the case into short brain storming sections the reader never gets bored and if you are in final year and doing long cases for finals, it walks you through the investigations and management sections as a clinical teachers on the ward would. Justifying investigations in particular is something I felt has just been lumped on in my final year and this book has helped massively.If, like me, you have a tendancy to over-complicate and structure your revision, this book is a vital tool and personally I use it as a spring board to look other things up in more detail (Eg. anatomy or what on earth would a that fungating venous ulcer look like?). Where are the obs and gynae, psych and paeds versions?! I would buy them tomorrow!