Customer Reviews

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 18th Edition

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having owned the 17th ed. of Harrison's and used it extensively, I thought I'd post up a review after having gotten then 18th ed. and used it a fair bit now. I'm a final year Canadian med student that i's surgery bound.

Overall:
- has the same super-thin paper with lots of colour photos and diagrams
- only comes in 2 volumes, which saves people the mistake of purchasing this in a 1 vol. tome.
-looks ~ 10% thicker than the previous edition
- side of pages has improved section colour-coding

Content:
- 397 Chapters and 57 eChapters which is up from 392 and 38
- when comparing chapters between the editions, there is changes in a fair bit of the text and many tables, although most images have been (rightly) retained

Organization:
- same good structure, with cardinal manifestations first then other topics clustered together (eg. Infectious Disease which is further subdivided by specific groups of bugs)
- they have made an effort to start new chapters at the top of the page, which might seem trivial but I definitely appreciate
- eChapters appropriately mentioned in logical points/relevant topics

Online Resources:
- to be honest, I rarely use this although I'm excited for Harrison's on the iPad as mentioned on the site
- the eChapters seem pretty much identical to what physical chapters are like , omitted to save space I would guess.
- eChapters tend to have some of the more soft-side of medicine things (ie Ethical Issues, Economics of Medical Care, etc)

Summary:
In the end, this continues to be one of the best books covering all the topics in internal medicine. These revisions help improve on something that was already a very good textbooks. It can be too much information for someone who is just looking for a brief overview of a topic, but I guess that's what we might use Wikipedia for. This is a great book if you really want to understand the disease well. Even as a surgeon, sometimes it's nice to know why the bones get soft but this book is geared towards docs/residents/medstudents in Internal Medicine!

Livre avec des gravures et photos tres bien fait. Rapidité de l'envoie. Rapport qualité-prix excellent.Je le conseillerait a tous étudiants en science santé.

This is an Excellent and well designed text book. The definitions, graphs and tables are all clear and explanatory. Many sections such as autism are new and/or contain much more information.

Editor Fauci includes van der Meer and Bleijenberg's egregiously inaccurate chapter on ME ("CFS"). It is no better than that in earlier editions by Fauci colleague Straus.

The article paints ME as having proven psychological components and relatively unproven organic components. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For example, they claim that "a direct microbial causation is unproven and unlikely." And that CBT and GET are the only proven treatments while acyclovir and many others have been proven ineffective.

And so on. I give Harrison's one star because such misrepresentations by Drs. van der Meer and Bleijenberg have caused a tremendous amount of iatrogenic morbidity in ME patients.

I am very eager to give Harrison's five-stars, because in most other respects, it really deserves it. I have learned a lot from it. Please substitute an accurate chapter on ME and I would be delighted to give it five-stars and evangelize for Harrison's. The essential documents on ME (with more than enough information to fill a chapter in Harrison's) are:

- the 2003 Canadian ME/CFS Consensus Criteria
[....]

- the 2010 validated research version of the above CCC
[....]

- the 2011 International ME Criteria
[...]

Please contact me if you wish further information or if you wish to find an author who will draft an accurate chapter for you free of charge. Thank you.