This series is very unusual. It is written by a very active clinician, educator, and researcher (who said the triple threat is gone?). It covers how to do and how to read exams, including the very basic or the very advanced. It emphasizes the skills of differential diagnosis and clinical interpretative logic.
Most unusually, it deals with the controversies in medicine. Most books simply ignore the controversies or just glosses over them. These volumes take the topic of controversies head-on:
Whenever you see this symbol (and it is all throughout these volumes), you know we are about to hit on a controversial topic. I will try to present both sides of the controversy, but then I will try to tell you how to handle it (and you’ll definitely learn what side of the controversy I support).
There aren’t many references in these volumes. My residents don’t want to hear “Smith et al studied 32 patients and found…”. They just want to hear the pertinent information and the leading opinion at present. I’ve been an academic editor and reviewer for 40 years, and I can find papers that support either side of a controversy. As a reviewer for the gray journal, over 90% of the papers I review are tossed out (but unfortunately, they all seem to end up published somewhere: “publish or perish”… in a tight environment, authors will go to less and less stringent journals until someone will accept it). A large percentage of the published literature is seriously flawed. If one stacks up all the papers on opinion A vs. opinion B, usually the highest stack is right, but even this isn’t universally true. Therefore: very few references.
The book is heavy with illustrations (a major advantage of being digital, because print costs would force a limitation on the use of color and on total illustration number). Many volumes also have an unknown section as well.
Overall, these volumes combined make a pretty complete GENERAL NUCLEAR MEDICINE TEXTBOOK. I hope you will utilize this as such.
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