Customer Reviews

Differential Diagnosis in Primary Care

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I use this book for a couple of years now in med school. Differential diagnosis is a tough subject to understand and to my surprise this book was the only one that did not let me down. As mentioned in JAMA it is indeed teaching the "art" of diagnosis. My learning strategy is to create diagrams and make my own notes. This book helps me in three ways:

1) firstly it is a COMPLETE book mentioning ALL possible diseases behind every symptom. I emphasize on the word "complete" because most powerfull books (like the famous Conrad Fischer's USMLE books) are incomplete. The writer was kind enough to analyze all possible causes of all symptoms in a way that makes sence, not just writing down a list. This makes it a good reference book in my library. Apart from the explanatory text, this differential diagnosis book has the most complete charts, and anatomy pictures for every symptom. Most symptoms are analyzed in tree ways, in text, in chart and in a "human body" figure.

2) Dr Collins takes you in a "journey" not by writing lists of possible causes, but helping you understand the "way of thinking" behind every symptom. It relates most causes with basic knowledge of anatomy or physiology making connections with your previous knowledge.

3) The third advantage is that the book is concise. Few words are enough for the writer to make his point and therefore, the book is quite "small" (about 500 pages) explaining all causes for every symptom.

I only wish Dr. Collins wrote a book with the same information listed by disease, not by symptoms. Also, the book doesn't containt any algorithms. Dr. collins wrote a separate algorithmic diagnosis book for this purpose http://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Diagnosis-Symptoms-Signs-Cost-Effective/dp/0781738059/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2

The book contains a review of systems for each differential diagnosis. The information is easy to follow and to the point. A colleague of mine let me review the book before I bought it, however even if I bought the it before reveiwing it, it would still have been a keeper.

I appreciated the visual charts which utilized the mnemonic "VINDICATE" to help r/o other differential diagnoses and the brief guidelines for approaching the diagnosis and ordering diagnostics.