Customer Reviews

The Official Patient's Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea: A Revised and Updated Directory for the Internet Age

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book got off on the wrong foot for me on the front cover. Calling the disease Acne Rosacea is a step backwards for all. No one is really calling it acne rosacea anymore. It is different enough from acne that the moniker is just confusing. Further, treating it like acne may just be the worst thing you can do.

The book is more of a template for `generic health researching' than anything specific to rosacea. The information is of such a generic level that a sourcebook on the next medical topic is just a search and replace away.

I thought that I might get to see some new information, but alas I was disappointed. On Page 4 we read
"All too often, patients diagnosed with acne rosacea will log on the the Internet, type words into a search engine, and receive several Web site listings which are mostly irrelevant or redundant"

Sadly this is the opposite of what you find. The National Rosacea Society comes up as a PageRank of 1 on Google. As much as we chastise the NRS, they do provide a very good starting point. If people were to start their search at the #1 rosacea web site then they will be on the right track. I'm not sure the same can be said for this book.

Later they promise "a chapter dedicated to helping you find your peer groups". They end up only mentioning a prescription drug page at rosacea-control.com, CureZone and MedHelp (of which CureZone didn't mention rosacea at all, and MedHelp timed out). Again they never mention the NRS or the Rosacea Support Group. I could keep going - the section on books doesn't mention the best text we have, the pages of links doesn't mention the Open Directory Project Categories ...

The Guidelines chapter is too short to contain anything useful. They talk about "another type of rosacea called vascular rosacea" this statement left me wondering if they had any idea what they were saying. Surely just paraphrasing the standard classification for rosacea would have been ideal introduction, especially when you are unsure of the topic you are addressing.

The whole aim of the series of books seems to be to give you information that you can't find on the well known `rosacea internet'. I have to say from my reading of this book there are scant new resources worth noting.

In the end the authors would have done better to embrace what they knocked in the first few pages. A trip to google.com, drop the `acne' bit at from `acne rosacea' and surf the first few sites you find. After that you will be in front of this book, and have something else to do with your $USD 25.