Customer Reviews

Surgical Recall, Fifth North American Edition (Recall Series)

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an excellent book for getting your attendings questions right, but it isn't going to help you for the shelf exam. It doesn't give clinical vignettes and doesn't introduce principles of managing conditions. Most of the surgery shelf exam has to do with managing post operative complications or how to manage a surgical patient as a medical intern. With that said, this book gives general information that a beginner needs to know ranging from where the surgeon stands and how to tie knots to how to classify orthopedic fractures. It is a good pocket book, but if you only have one source to choose to pass the shelf, leave this one at the store.

I found the OR to be an almost laughable game once I started reading Recall. The attendings would ask the exact questions in Recall in almost every case with very few exceptions. Knowing what case you are about go into and taking the 10 mins or so to read the relevant chapter or section in Recall made answering those questions very easy.

I never tried to read Recall from cover to cover. Doing so would be painfully difficult as it is truly just a list of high yield facts with very little interpretation or explanation.

Recall is organized around procedures / diagnosis and as such is of limited use as a reference for expanding a differential diagnosis in a case write up.

It is, however, an absolutely invaluable tool for surviving the OR.

Surgery is a difficult rotation in terms of content and time commitment. Therefore, it's best to study to maximize your time. This book will prepare you for surviving rounds and those pimp sessions while you are retracting. The book is well organized by topic and great to quickly review before discussing/encountering a particular patient. The book saved me several times during a long surgery. However, of note, to survive the shelf exam and osce, you will need a textbook as well. Good choices to supplement this book would be Essentials of General Surgery or First Aid for the Surgery Clerkship.

This book is great for those who don't have much time to read textbooks... it allows important information to be learned with minimal time!

I agree with previous reviews that this book should be a supplemental book not your primary tool for learning all that you need to know in surgery. At a minimum you should aim to get through all of the info in this book (minus the info in the surgical specialty section) during you rotation, but this book alone may not be enough to do well on shelf.

I wish I had read this book before my OB/GYN rotation! This is perfect for sounding smart when you get pimped (ever get asked what different types of sutures are made from?) and killing time when you are sitting in pre-op waiting for the patient to go back. Lots of interesting and useful tidbits.

Book gives you the most important surgically relevant information for each condition. Great for students on clinical rotation/clerkship.

This book is fantastic to study from. The diagrams, triad listings, and Q&A format is wonderful for my surgery rotation as a PA student. However, the book is a little heavy to carry around during rotations in the lab coat. As a student it's imperative to carry around as many references as possible so when a question arises i have a quick way to look it up but this is just a little too bulky but it is perfect to study from

I had this book for my surgery rotation and I was noted to have a tremendous knowledge base by the course director. He said, "either you're spending a lot of time reading, or you're not reading and you're just brilliant." This was the first course where I used the recall series and let me just say that I am not "brilliant" and there is no way someone can read a lot during a surgery rotation. It was all this text.

It's great to glance at between cases or when there's five minutes down time. And, it covers all the questions you're likely to be pimped on (that's why it looked like I knew a lot).

This book is great for surgery rotations. Everything you need at a glance. Good to look at right before surgery