Clinician's Guide to Laboratory Medicine: Pocket

This pocket book is amazing you can carry with you everywhereand really helpfulI am currently studying master in clinical biochemistry and its really helpful specially with casesand Acid -BaseI wish i had this book when i was practicing medicine it would be really good in rounds and on-callsSo if you are a doctor or a biochemist its a good bookhelp with differential diagnosisnot detailed - but what can you expect its a pocket book-

The book serves it purpose perfectly. I would buy it again. I agree that the letters are too small, but it's a consult book and not a study book. You search what you need, read it and you get your answer. I just wish it had more information, but for that I guess I need to buy the non-concise version.4/5.

This little book is certainly portable, but to make it the publishers have simply shrunk the text to a point size which is actually quite difficult to read, even for someone with good eyesight. By contrast the Oxford Handbooks, whilst slightly taller (but no wider) are far better quality of printing and much easier to read. A more fatal issue (excuse the pun) is that Americans, bless 'em, insist on using different units and different abbreviations to the rest of the planet, and so FBC (full blood count) becomes CBC, and so on. Not really that useful in the UK therefore. Best avoided for UK students and doctors.

Excellent book!The only problem is that the print is very small, but I mean much smaller than what you would expect.Really is a shame.

Too bad this book is all american units, it is slightly useful, but none of the findings are in Canadian units so its hard to establish what is normal and abnormal.

I have purchased a number of similar "pocket" books on various medical subjects, but often find them lacking in content and value compared to the larger texts from which they are drawn - meaning that for anything beyond the basic information they aren't good for much more than a quick reference to point you in the right direction on where to look in the 10 lb textbook version. I was pleasantly surprised to find that was not at all the case here, Dr. Desai has managed to create a pocket sized book that stands on its own without the need for a larger textbook to back it up. I think that it is partially due to the excellent, logical organization that the book gains value disproportionate to its compact size. It is packed with information, but you don't have to search very hard to find anything that you are looking for and it gives enough information to help you connect the dots and do some critical thinking in the context of your patient. I find it especially useful for vaguely abnormal, nonspecific clusters of lab findings as it provides a detailed range of possibilities and pathology for each value that, interpreted together with the larger clinical picture, can help you to find an easily missed diagnosis or at least figure out what the next set of questions to ask should be. Highly recommended.

Useful,comprehensive,handy ,all rolled into one.Highly recommended.

PBL groups are becoming common place at most med schools. As a first year student, I know I was not alone in feeling completely lost when it came to interpreting lab values during these sessions. This information simply was not taught to us, so we would be forced to Google lab tests to figure out what they were really telling us. A lot of time would be wasted and often the searches led to useless results. Clinician's Guide to Laboratory Medicine: Pocket is an excellent, time-saving and more accurate alternative to this approach. It explains the basics of each laboratory test, the causes of abnormal values (i.e., the differential diagnoses one should consider), and the approach one should take following an abnormal result. It also provides several algorithms in the form of decision trees for assessing abnormal results. I can see this being an extremely useful resource in the years ahead during clerkship rotations and will be recommending this book to classmates.In regards to other reviews that mentioned the font size, yes it is small but it should be a non-issue for the majority of med students with normal or myopic vision. If you're having trouble reading the text in this book, maybe it's time to invest in a good pair of reading glasses.