Customer Reviews

Medical-Surgical Nursing: Assessment and Management of Clinical Problems, Single Volume, 6e

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I have now in my 3rd semester of using this nursing textbook. I understand the hatred for textbooks in general, but hatred for this textbook specifically is beyond me. In contrast to the many other reviews on Amazon, I have found the book extremely well written. I have likely read every word of over half of this textbook and have found it to be the most helpful of all of those textbooks we have used in the nursing program with the exception of Lehne's Pharmacology text which is exceptional.

I would go so far as to recommend this textbook as a useful tool for a practicing nurse (not a student) to purchase as an at-home reference to read prior to entering a new field of critical care or med-surg nursing or to touch up on areas which have been missed.

The general format of the book is within each body system or area of nursing, first a chapter or two of background information the physiology and pathophysiology of the systems are included. Then nursing functions within that area are presented. First health history and noninvasive physical assessments are discussed, followed by common diagnostic coverage. There are tons of tables and charts which make learning easy.

In summary, I found this book to be one of the most readable and useful of my double-major college experience. Highly recommmended.

http://www.hantla.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=234

I just graduated from the second largest nursing school in Texas and we used this textbook for two semesters, (the school has a contract to use only Mosby textbooks). I, along with many of my fellow classmates, hated this textbook for a number of reasons. First, I found the content to be "wordy," confusing, and often times contradictory. The bottom line is that it's a poorly written text. There are grammatical errors throughout the text that made me absolutely cringe and there was not a week that didn't go by that we didn't have to approach our professors asking them "what are they trying to say here?" In fact, some of us were thinking of contacting Mosby publishing and asking them to have a non-medical English professor proof-read the text before publication. It's interesting to note that we found this same problem with other Mosby textbooks: Pediatric, maternity, foundations, etc. The only time we didn't have a problem with the text was when we did our psych rotation. The Mosby Psych text was not ready and so we had to go with another publisher: Saunders, which was far superior to Mosby. In fact, I asked my clinical professor why the school didn't use Saunders and that's when I learned that the school was contracted with Mosby. Damn Politics! I would go as far to say that the main reason I made it through Nursing school was because I went out and bought the Saunders (and Lippincott) textbooks. Anytime I didn't understand what Mosby was trying to say (which was often!) I would refer to Saunders or Lippincott and the light-bulb would always come on. Bottom line: avoid Mosby if you can.

It took me almost two months to deeply appreciate this book. I must admit that I disliked the book initially, much like several of the other reviewers listed here. However, after one of my classmates in our Nursing Refresher Course raved about the book's nursing care plans, I took a deeper look at the material and was thrilled by the comprehensiveness and timeliness of the information presented. For example, the chapter on Alzheimer's disease and dementia contained information about diagnostic tests that is often only found in neurology textbooks intended for physicians. When I worked for a neurologist, the only resources I had for very specific diagnostic studies were the Mayo Clinic's diagnostic studies manual and the physician's neurology textbooks, some of which were several years old.

Overall, I believe this book serves as an excellent resource for pathophysiology, diagnostic studies, and nursing care plans. The tables and illustrations are beautiful, user friendly, and highly informative. Each chapter is organized according to the nursing process, which focuses on critical thinking and problem solving.

Don't delay in adding this textbook to your nursing library. This textbook is a great resource for nurses working in hospitals, doctors offices, clinics, wound care, patient education, and public health nursing. There is also an excellent section in the chapter on emergency care situations that covers agents of bioterrorism, which is very useful to nurses working in trauma centers and the military.

I am a nursing student and former editor with a Master's degree in English.

This may sound extreme, but I think this book is dangerous. The problem with this book goes beyond wordiness, poor organization and contradictory information. It involves a process.

The student dedicates an hour or two reading a chapter, puts the book down and says, Boy, I've worked hard; I must have learned something.

And, yes, the student has worked hard. Very hard. The student has waded thigh-high in verbiage for nearly two hours. So, he's right to think he's worked hard to understand the material.

But that doesn't mean the student has learned a commensurate amount. He hasn't.

In other words, this book is deceptive. You work hard, so you think that translates into knowledge, but what you're working hard to do is to understand what in the heck the authors are saying.

This book needs a no-nonsense editor. Someone who understands that more words doesn't mean greater clarity.

The school I attend uses this book. I suffered the first year; the second year, I never touched this book. I bought a different one.

If you're a student, don't waste your time, like I did. Your hours will be better spent with other texts.

This book is 80% verbage and 20% needed information. The ratio is similar to that you might get from listening to bloated bureacrat explain federal regulations for the purchase of government pencils.

The worst part about this book is that upon first reading, it actually seems to contain information. You don't realize how much verbage there is until it comes time to take a nursing test.

Don't listen to these other reviewers. Avoid this book at all costs. I've spent hours poring over a single chapter only to find a shorter more compact book that got the info across in ten minutes.

I like to get to the point. This book has lots of information that is put together well. One of the best things this book did was have care plans laid out in each chapter. These basically act as a snap shot of what to look for, and the nursing interventions you would perform as a nurse. That makes studying for your exams in nursing school a little easier. My wife's nursing school used Lippincott's Med Surg book, and I have to say that compared to that text this one gets to the point much quicker. I was a little disappointed that this book glances over some of the pathophysiology (I would have preferred that it was a little more in depth here), and that it spends way too much time going over Anatomy and Physiology. All nursing students have to take a Anatomy and Physiology course not every school provides a pathophysiology class. All in all I was pleased with it. However, this book does tend to ramble from time to time.

I am a nursing student at a university in the US and we are using this book for a single semester.

I don't know where and how to start.

This is THE WORST book I have ever read/used in my entire career as a student (8 years). It's beyond wordiness, numerous spelling mistakes, and incredible repetitiveness makes it a nightmare to read or even to use as a reference.

Everyone in my class hates it to death. My school most likely uses it because of lucrative contracts to Elsevier, despite vociferous pleas by the students to change it.

There were times when I seriously considered throwing this book outside my bedroom window.

The authors & publisher should be equally *ASHAMED* of themselves for printing this academic travesty.

**AVOID IT LIKE THE PLAGUE**

I was excited to start CNI with this book because at first glance it seemed so much better than my Fundamentals book (Perry and Potter) which used in-text citation and truly believed therapeutic touch worked! It was impossible to read through and digest. However, as you advance in the Lewis text and in your knowledge base, this book becomes a chore to read through. The large majority of the diagrams and photos are worthless, of poor quality, limited information and many don't even have a legend! The text is poorly edited, so there is a lot of redundant material (which isn't the worst thing except in a >1800 page textbook). Worse than that is the frequent use of complex terms that are undefined (Thank goodness for Dr. Google and Wikipedia). And there is even inconsistent material (e.g., preop care chapter 18 says minimum fast for clear liquids is 2 hours, while chapter 22 recommends 6-8 hours for outpatient cataract surgery!) My personal 'favorite' is trying to second guess the functional health patterns. Why (Chapter 21) someone who is embarrassed by his ptosis has a self perception problem but a person who is embarrassed by his exopthalmos has a role-relationship problem will haunt me through my career. And our whole study group had a good laugh about having difficulty finding a toilet falling into activity-exercise pattern category and not the elimination pattern category (Chapter 39). I can only project than none of this really matters in nursing.
The text is so wordy (an understatement) and the header outlines difficult to decipher that you have to keep backing up to see what section you are reading about. (Instead of useless learning objectives first part of chapter should just have an outline, formatted like the text so you can refer back to it as you get lost).

I found the Complementary and Alternative Therapies chapter particularly bothersome, with table after table of 'commonly used---" and comments in the table legend like "strong scientific evidence" and "good scientific evidence" with not a SINGLE reference. This all needs to be carefully reviewed and if you are going to say strong evidence, you are obliged to state the source. Many times I tried to find this so called evidence in peer reviewed literature and found the opposite: this stuff just doesn't work.

The study guide doesn't really reflect text content or emphasis, but luckily our tests use some of this verbatim, so its been useful. Ditto for the evolve website.

This is the 7th edition of this text. The editors are getting complacent. We'll be using this text for CNII, so I am on the hunt for a good Med Surg text to read and learn from. I'll stick with study guide to get me through the tests.

This a great reference book that I used througout nursing school. This was a great book for writing care plans or the random papers that we had to write. This is another one of the few books that I kept from college.

This version is my Med-Surg instructor's favorite Med-Surg book ever. She pulls many of her test questions from this version. It was well worth my effort to go online and purchase a used copy of it.

This book is well written and includes a lot of stuff my instructor assures us could help us around HESI and NCLEX time over the other Med-Surg books we have seen.

Although this was not a required list book for my course I am still very glad I chose to order it.