Volume 1 of this two-volume unusual textbook of medicine is the product of a long-time yearning that I have had for authoring a multi-specialty textbook that goes straight to the point in addressing the needs of medical students who will eventually practice in a setting that I call “the frontline.” In addition to medical students I had busy practicing general practitioners in mind as they attend to a wide range of patients with medical challenges that may span multiple specialties.
The third category of target-users of this book is specialists who are consulted by occasional patients whose medical issues are not in their specialty. Starting with medical students, the experience of majority of them is attending to voluminous books with contents that make such physical books difficult to carry about; some, even those meant for the pre-clinical years, are so heavy that the student cannot carry more than one book at a time. What the student reads at a sitting may be less than one chapter as only a fast reader with a high capacity to absorb fresh material can satisfactorily cover a chapter. I was there when there were no e-books and, today, many students still have to read physical books. This book is in paperback and e-book formats. It is only a medical student who does not want to read a full chapter that will not cover a chapter of this book at a sitting – after all, only very few chapters have more than 4000 words or approximately 7 to 8 pages of 8.5” x 11”.
With respect to busy doctors working in the general medical practice setting I crafted this book to make it ideal for keeping on their office or consulting room bookshelves. These doctors hardly have the time to read as much as they used to do in the medical school as “patients come first” unlike in the medical school where “passing examinations comes first.” The doctors may simply need to check information in one specialty or another but why search many pages of a typical specialty textbook for the required information that may be tucked away in one, two, or three paragraphs of the book. And, should they require doing that more than once in a consulting session or full day of work, how much time would they spend doing so or how long would other patients wait for them to finish making such references? When doctors happen to be in the frontline – where they are the first doctor to attend to a walk-in patient without appointment or referral letter in a busy hospital or clinic – availability of a book that provides reliable, current, and brief information/guidance is a goldmine. This is where this book fills an important gap.
The final group whose need this book meets is specialists and super-specialists. Sometimes this class of doctors may need to cross-check facts that are outside their areas of specialization. Experience shows that some patients have multiple morbidities and take multiple drugs that may be outside the scope of practice of the super-specialists – yet they have to make decisions that should not be detrimental to the index patient. This book becomes a friend in need and also a friend indeed.
You are welcome to this medium-sized book with Sections written by multiple specialists. It covers Public health, Family medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Psychiatry, and Pathology.
