Customer Reviews

Consultative Hemostasis and Thrombosis, 2e (Kitchens, Consultative Thrombosis and Hemostatis)

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Outstanding book for the practicing hematologist who sees a lot of hemostasis and thrombosis cases.

This book is easy to read unlike many textbooks on the subject. This is the best resource I have come across regarding coagulation issues during pregnancy and in the surgical patient.

I'm not an MD but I'm intimately involved in the clotting cascade. I need to know the latest in technology for diagnosis and treatment of clotting and bleeding disorders, particularly for cardiopulmonary bypass. On several occasions I've consulted this book for background information on how to treat a patient, only to find that the information just isn't there, or perhaps the book is only written for post-graduate hematologists, already in practice who already understand everything that is discussed and just need a quick reference. There are those of us who work in the healthcare arena as a team and are expected to update our skills and share what we've learned with other members of the team. Just because someone has an MD doesn't mean they know everything that a hematologist would know. As an example, the condition "warm-reactive autoimmune hemolytic anemia" wasn't sufficiently covered as it pertains to cardiopulmonary bypass. I couldn't find the terms "warm agglutinin", "cold agglutinin" or even "agglutinin" in the index, though perhaps it is there somewhere else. There wasn't a discussion on Heparin-Protamine titration (HPT) techniques or a comparison of the different technologies for measuring HPTs and activated clotting times (ACTs). There is a section on patients who don't respond to platelet inhibitors due to a genetic defect, but I couldn't find anything on the newest platelet mapping techniques and how to test the effectiveness of platelet inhibitors on patients and what it means for their treatment. Patients are placed on platelet inhibitors blindly without proper genetic testing or follow-up for efficacy, and a book like this should surely cover this topic as how to test for effectiveness. For someone who is involved in primarily cardiac patients that may or may not have clotting and/or bleeding disorders, I recommend the book "Principles and Practice of Point-of-Care Testing" by Gerald J. Kost, M.D., Ph.D., even though it is an older book.