Every practitioner today will welcome the Handbook of Medicine in Psychiatry as the first realistic, evidence-based overview of medicine for psychiatrists in training or practice because it is
- Written to address the lack of empirical data showing how the type of medical knowledge acquired through traditional psychiatric residency training can be used in the psychiatric setting.
- Organized to reflect the realities confronting clinicians working in self-standing inpatient psychiatric settings, where inadequate histories, premature diagnostic closure, and a reluctance to perform physical assessments contribute to underrecognized, misdiagnosed, and suboptimally treated medical disorders in at least half of all psychiatric patients.
- Based on the findings of a retrospective analysis of internal medicine evaluations requested for 1,001 patients (501 men and 500 women, ranging from age 8 to 98) admitted in 2002 to a 208-bed urban private psychiatric hospital, which found that most medical consultations requested in a psychiatric hospital were due to a limited group of symptoms, signs, and laboratory abnormalities—that is potential side effects of psychotropic drugs (falls, hyperglycemia, hypotension, hyponatremia, nausea, constipation, leucopenia), pain symptoms, and respiratory and urinary tract infections.
- Structured for easy reading and comprehension, with topics grouped in 14 sections according to a common feature, such as cardiac arrest, abnormal vital signs, pain, signs of common infections, and respiratory distress; 5 chapters that discuss essential features in clinical presentation, differential diagnosis, risk stratification, and assessment and management in the psychiatric setting.
- Focused on the ways in which psychiatric disorders and their treatments produce pathophysiologic changes and alter the classic presentation of common and serious conditions.
