Customer Reviews

Anesthesia Secrets, 4e

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I owned the first edition of this book during medical school while taking a rotation in Anesthesiology, and it was an INVALUABLE aid! I could find many answers to questions I was "pimped" on during the rotation, which were hard or impossible to find in the standard large text books. I highly recommend it to anyone doing a rotation in, planning on going into, or working in and around Anesthesiologists! An absolutely wonderful book, buy it!

This book is extremely well written and has all the information you are most likely to be pimped on. When residents have seen me reading it they say this is one of the best books around and that this new edition is extremely well done with the use of color and organization of topics. Most of these same residents will whip out their old copies and ask if they can compare the two to see if its worth them buying the new edition.

If you already have a solid Physiology background, I suggest buying only this book and not wasting your time buying the baby Miller(Basics of Anesthesia).

Where you can get the "MEAT" of each area without reading a lot of miscellaneous information.

I'm studying for Nurse Anesthesia boards and this book is very helpful. Clear and easy to read. I highly recommend it.

Great reference! I am a Nurse Anesthetist and I use this book almost daily with my clinical students. The book is direct and to the point. It is logically arranged and well written. I also have the second ed. and this is a vast improvement. I ordered several for my fellow anesthetist. Nice job Dr. Duke!!!

I have used this book, periodically, since my CA-1 year, and I find the material to be useful as an adjunct, or supplementation, in my studies for my anesthesiology boards.

You should not use this book alone to learn the art and science of anesthesiology, as the discipline requires a voluminous amount of study to be a safe and competent practitioner. This book, however, is good for it's intended use by the Author, James Duke, MD, University of Colorado, by taking a large amount of knowledge and making it digestable for practical scenarios.

Solid references and bibliographies make this a reliable resource.

As a nurse I have worked in PACU for a couple of years, but it was only after reading through this book, temporarily abandoned on a table in the unit by one of the residents, that I realized of how much about the subject I was quite ignorant. I decided to remedy the deficiency by reading more on the topic. Although we had a number of books on the nursing aspect of anesthesia, I found that most of them bogged me down in things I really didn't need to know to do my job. It was interesting to learn about the demographics of PACU nurses or about the amount of space needed for each patient bed, for instance, but it wasn't really helpful. I decided to purchase the book the resident had been reading, Anesthesia Secrets. I wasn't disappointed.

Although there is a lot of information about the field of medical anesthesia for which a nurse is not ultimately responsible, it is certainly useful to have that knowledge, as it specifically underlies patient care decisions. It also helps make one aware of the adverse outcomes that may arise from anesthesia and what to look for to prevent them. As in ICU, perhaps even more so than in ICU, the nurse has considerable decision making autonomy, and it is important that his/her background be adequate to undertake the responsiblity. In general, I found this book was much more pertinent to what I was actually doing in PACU than nursing books were.

I also found the volume helpful specifically to me, as I spent about a year as the PACU's night nurse, and one of the components of my job was the scrutiny of patient labs for irregularities prior to surgery. It helped to know those specific labs that were important to anesthesiology, what their normals were, and what lower (or higher) limits were acceptable for the OR. Levels that might not be of over riding significance to a particular service, such as BMT for instance, might prove important to the OR and be a cause for dropping the patient from the schedule.

Well worth the money. I was very impressed.

This book is great for anesthesia beginners like me. Just it gives you a general idea about what anesthesiology is all about.

This is a pretty decent review book for some of the most common things you will see on Anesthesia rotations. It's not meant to be a reference book, so it's tough to find specific topics sometimes. It gives you a pretty good overview of different areas in anesthesia. I think it's a much better book then blueprints, but it's a lot more detailed so it takes a while to read the whole book.

I just received this book and I recommend it even if you aren't interested in anesthesia, it references quite a bit to physiology and pharmacology which for me since step I is long forgotten.. so it is a nice refresher and sure to cover easily a few questions that won't just show up on rounds but on the boards..
here is a sample of the topics covered:

I. BASICS OF PATIENT MANAGEMENT
1 AUTONOMIC NERVOUS SYSTEM
2 RESPIRATORY AND PULMONARY PHYSIOLOGY
3 BLOOD GAS AND ACID-BASE ANALYSIS
4 FLUIDS AND VOLUME REGULATION AND DISTURBANCES (for me acid base/ fluids and electrolytes) have been somewhat of an Achilles, so glad it is covered here..
5 ELECTROLYTES
6 TRANSFUSION THERAPY
7 COAGULATION
8 AIRWAY MANAGEMENT
9 PULMONARY FUNCTION TESTING
10 VOLATILE ANESTHETICS


anyhow the list is quite lengthy. with this book you'll also be given a code to student consult, so if you are at home with your laptop you can just do your studying there... I haven't gotten past respiratory and pulmonary physiology but this book is extremely well written and I look forward to finishing it.. I am also supplementing it with Anesthesia unplugged, which is really quite a humorous addition...