Customer Reviews

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, Self-Assessment and Board Review

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Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine: Self-assessment and Board Review, 16th ed.

This book has review choose-the-best-answer questions. Chapters include Introduction to clinical medicine, Genetics, Oncology and Hematology, Infectious Diseases, Disorders of cardiovascular system, Disorders of the respiratory system, Critical care medicine, Disorders of the kidney and urinary tract, Disorders of the GI system, Rheumatology and immunology, Endocrinology and metabolism, and Neurologic disorders. The book was published in 2005, and has about 360 pages.

Pros:
1. Will review many topics related to different disciplines of internal medicine. You will be asked questions related to common and very rare diseases.
2. Great explanations to the questions.
3. Well-referenced answers with relevant chapter(s) in Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine to enable you to read further.
4. 19 Questions have colored pictures which are presented at the end of the book.

Cons:
1. No normal common lab ranges provided.
2. The units of some lab values are American e.g. mg/dL.
3. Some questions have spelling or editing mistakes e.g. in Infectious Disease section, the stem of question number 12 is duplicated.
4. Some questions are not well-written. For example, some questions have options such as (A and B).
5. Many questions are not case-based.
6. Some questions have stems which begin with "All but which of the following ...", or, "All the following is .... except", or, "Which of the following is not correct?". The only advantage of these types of questions is that they measure factual information directly.
7. Some imaging pictures are not good quality, such as question X-35 on Rheumatology, page 278. There are many black-and-white pictures.

Im a med student using this book for review for my Medicine shelf exam and I dont like some of the format of the "All of the above..." type answers and questions with "A AND B" as answers. But that said the book goes well with Harrison's textbook.

It is one of the best self-assessment books... simple to use, easy to understand and very helpful to review the most updated concepts.. I would recommended it to any med student or resident...

Fauci is a very poor scientist. He lets his own political beliefs bias his medical opinions. As he has been in high positions in NIH this serves to greatly retard medical science and cause much suffering to disabled Americans. An example is his steadfast support of Stephen Straus in his disinformation campaign on ME (aka CFS). Fauci still includes the deceased Straus' inaccurate article as the section on ME in this edition.

Internist Paul Cheney, MD, PhD, the world's foremost clinican and top researcher on ME said of Straus' findings in his most (self-)publicized study, "it's an absolute lie." Internist Dan Peterson, also one of the world's foremost clinicians and researchers on ME said "Stephen Straus is a snake." Straus was still doing grand rounds in the mid- late 90's saying possible retroviral association with ME made no sense because retroviruses cause neurological, cognitive, immunological and endocrine pathology, which aren't prominent features of ME. These are in fact the central, disabling features of the disease. And of course quite a few bench scientists have found retroviral involvement since 1986, most recently Judy Mikovits and Frank Ruscetti at NCI.

Nearly a month ago I placed an order for the books and chose a supposedly quicker mode of delivery and have still not recieved the same.
After I sent in an email a week after purchasing the books and obtained a polite reply, I realised how bloody efficient delivery would be.. The fine print should appear at the time of purchase of goods.
In future I will definitely think very carefully if I really need to buy anything from Amazon.