OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Handbook of Anaesthesia

What I expected thank you. Value for money

After living in Australia for 10 years and practicing clinical anesthesiology, which includes teaching junior doctors, my opinion about this book gradually changed. It is not the authors' fault, but this handbook is terribly misused by trainees, who constitute the majority of its readers. Because it is small, registrars prefer to carry it around in their bags instead of more comprehensive texts, such as Miller's. But learning a field of medicine from a handbook is similar to trying to become a linguist in a foreign language by reading a phrase books for tourists: the education it brings is superficial at best. In this respect the book is doing way more damage than good. When I wrote my first, favorable review of this handbook in 2005 I though it would be useful for getting through the final college exam, which incidentally is the purpose of using it for the majority of registrars. At the end though, I barely opened it. It is much more useful, instead of skimming through summaries laid out in the handbook, to read a full chapter on the topic from a reputable textbook and add the information from couple of review articles. This way you obtain or refresh the knowledge in depth without taking that much more time.As a handbook it is helpful....for people like myself, who need a reference for unusual cases. For example, if I come across to a patients with porphyria I can quickly page to the topic and refresh my memory, as well as to get the latest info, as lists of allowed and forbidden drugs in this condition continuously drift. Even though the information in a printed book is already outdated by at least a year. And given the universal availability of the Internet on mobile devices, from phones to laptops, the need for such literature is rapidly decreasing. Instead of browsing this book I can get online and quickly get an update from a journal review article, a large online anesthetic textbook and many other resources now available in the Net.Once again, this is not the authors' fault, but this book encourages cutting corners, and because of that I don't like that.

I loved the book, even though it is not in my own language.It is great to find things to be sure!

This book is a must for the novice anasethetist. It lays out everything, and I mean everything, in a structured format. When you're on call and not sure how to approach a case, this book will tell you how. The only problem is it's big,. but then I guess that can't be helped. If you thinking should I buy this book? Then don't think just buy it, you won't be disappointed.