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THE LANCET HANDBOOK OF TREATMENT IN NEUROLOGY
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To order this title, and for more information, click here
By
Charles Warlow, BA, MB, BChir, MD, FRCP, Professor of Medical Neurology, Department of Clinical Neurosciences, Western General Hospital, Edinburgh, UK
Reviews
WARLOW: LANCET HANDBOOK OF TREATMENT IN NEUROLOGY
There can be few book reviewers so dedicated to their art that they do not experience
a slight decline in spirits on learning that their Book Review Editor has sent them an
offering edited by a recent president of the
ABN, whose authors include former colleagues and friends, some of whom still smart from sporting defeats. Here goes. This
wee book
is great! Firstly, it is small, weighing only 499g and would fit into a ?white coat' pocket or one of those redundant pouches in the
freebie conference hold-all that transports the laptop and may just convince any nearby eagle eyed postgraduate education budget manager
that you actually went. Secondly, it has a bendy plastic cover,
more resilient than paper, more flexible than hard back, and coffee-resistant.
It can be cleaned with a wet cloth!
The title represents a gleeful and hopefully final nail in the coffin of the time-expired
perception of neurology as a ?diagnose and adios' speciality, a perception that needs burying both to encourage recruitment of future
neurologists and to help treat patients with ?incurable' diseases.
So to the contents. Nineteen chapters penned by renowned authors
covering the traditional subjects with some welcome relative newcomers. ?Emotional disorders,
functional somatic disorders and psychoses?
(all in 16 pages); ?Neuropathic pain? (14 pages); ?Neurogenic pelvic organ dysfunction? (20 pages) and ?Anaesthesia for patients with
neurological disease? (7 pages) all provide a useful start point for those unfamiliar with or seeking refreshers in such areas.
The
style is clearly laid out with an emphasis on therapeutics, but bullet points on definitions, epidemiology, pathology, and prognosis
abound and so they should,
since a book comprising pure treatment regimes alone would be pretty indigestible. Treatment is so much
more than writing a prescription and non-pharmacological
therapy is generously summarised.
The drug treatment schedules themselves
are clear and specific and one is left in no doubt when such edicts are based on less than concrete evidence. Adverse effects of recommended
treatments and monitoring requirements add considerably to the utility of the text. What this book is not is a source for in-depth exploration
of neurology for either the inquisitive youngster or the more seasoned campaigner tasked with postgraduate neurology teaching or lecturing.
What it represents is a concentrated source of hard practical therapeutic information spanning the vast breadth of our subject which
will be invaluable to those whose job plan still leaves time to see the occasional patient.
John Bowen,
County Hospital, Lincoln,
Advances
in Clinical Neuroscience & Rehabilitation: May / June 2007
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