Customer Reviews

Berne and Levy Physiology: with STUDENT CONSULT Online Access, 6e (Physiology (Berne))

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

 

 

I am a current medical student at the University of Connecticut who has been forced to use Berne and Levy to study physiology over the course of the year. While Dr. Koeppen ranks among one of the best professors whom I have ever had, unfortunately, his textbook is one of the worst. It is riddled with a shocking number of errors. These are not your typical run-of-the-mill omissions of "the" or "as," but incorrectly printed EQUATIONS and DESCRIPTIONS. While we were warned about many of these errors, several slipped past the detection of our professors. For example, in the Respiratory Chapter, the entire medical school class memorized an incorrect relationship for spirometry because it was incorrectly stated in the chapter. If at all possible, use an alternative reference for your physiology course. If you are taking a physiology course, you likely have enough to worry about- you don't need to worry about whether the information you are reading is correct.

this book was required reading for my class. The content was up to date when I read it, but the presentation is not the best. It's a difficult book to read. I would not have purchased it if it was not required for the course.

This Physiology text is a great book for those studying mid and upper level human physiology. It has a very organized way of introducing the material and covers the topics well. Additionally, it makes good use of many clear cartoon illustrations of hard to memorize pathways and difficult to understand concepts.

That being said, the book lacks the detail that a medical or research physiologist would want to have. I have taken several physiology courses as both an undergraduate and graduate student and have found this text to be lacking when compared to that of Boron and Boulpaep. It doesn't cover the receptors in nearly as much detail, and many pathways are simply mentioned and never explained. If you really want to know what is going on, you would have to supplement this text (or to a degree any text) with a review of current journal materials.

Where do I start?

Lacks the basic diagrams needed to understand important concepts, the diagrams that are availabe are very confusing and unclear.
Ive had to purchase guyton just to understand whats going on in class, which by the way I wound up getting an A in the end...but only becasue I read from Guyton
Terribly written, confusing to understand.
Very weak in terms of getting the concept across. The writers and the creates need to either A-NEVER EVER WRITE AGAIN, OR B- LEARN HOW TO WRITE AND PUT TOGETHER A PROPERLY THOUGHT OUT TEXTBOOK!

Give me back my money

Excellent book, volume is optimized with the information. Illustrations are very easy to understand and memorize. However in a few occasions I noticed a tendency to postulate something without an explanation or references what term and why was taken (e.g. formulas in the molecular section). Probably it is done for the sake of shortness, and in the assumption, that medical students in any case are not willing to understand the underlying physics.

Don't have a lot to say except that the writing is well done, the charts really explain the material well and allow for a quick review down the line, and the clinical correlations on nearly every page help solidify the information with common things we will see in the future. Great book all around, and I recommend it to any medical student that is considering it. WORTH THE MONEY.

I don't recommend this book There are several typos and index problems. Content could be stated better and didn't flow well. I found that researching the internet gave better explanations. This book was a waste of money but it's required for school so I had to purchase.

This text is so annoying to read. You read a section and you think: why did they write it so difficult. It could be written so much more straight-forward, but it is not. I recommend Guyton or if you can find Berne-Levy's 4th edition which is much better. Don't waste your time on this one. It is one of those book that will leave you with new gray hair.

The key to selecting a useful textbook for physiology lies in knowing the depth of knowledge you actually need. Having gone through med school and learnt physiology as part of the course, i actually found that Berne & Levy was really too detailed to use as a primary text. I used B&L, Ganong, and Guyton primarily as references when i needed more in depth detail on certain topics. An excellent book for undergraduates is a text by the author Sherwood. This book gives an excellent conceptual account of human physiology, so that you understand the principles. In books like B&L, it's easy to lose the big picture in all the detail, particularly as a student when it's all new material.

Having said that, i'm now using B&L along with several other texts to study for my anesthesiology exams. It undoubtedly has the best cardiovascular chapter of any physiology text.

Take home message is that if you are studying physiology for postgraduate purposes, you'll probably need B&L as well as several other texts. As a student, i'd recommend using a more basic text and consulting B&L for the fine print.

Poor writing and editing makes this book overly difficult to read and thus grasp new and difficult concepts. I was forced to consistently reread a sentence several times to understand what it was saying because of subject-verb -adjective confusion, problems that should be absent in a text dealing with tough material. Many typos etc. make this a poor choice for learning physiology.