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Senior Scientist, Department of Laboratory Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
Ambulatory Care Clinical Pharmacy Team Leader, Pharmacy Department, Clinical Center, National Institutes of Health
Published Online, May 9, 2006. www.theannals.com, DOI 10.1345/aph.1G685
Format: A conventional print edition and new digital, self-assessment, and board review (not described here) editions are available. This digital version contains differences in links to other McGraw-Hill products depending on specific subscriptions the reader may have. Institutional subscriptions may include access to Harrison's Online, Hurst's The Heart, LANGE Educational Library, Current Medical Diagnosis & Treatment, Tintinalli's Emergency Medicine, Fitzpatrick Color Atlas, and Williams Obstetrics. With all subscriptions, the digital version allows for subject search and links to McGraw-Hill's AccessMedicine resources, including related updates and contents, Diagnosaurus (DDx personal digital assistant [PDA] software), and drug information (gold standard practice guidelines, patient education material, health news from major newspapers).
System Requirements: An individual Internet subscription provides access to the digital version until August 2009. Any recent Web browser software should be adequate on a PC, while Macintosh requires Internet Explorer or a similar browser. The access code for Internet subscription can be used only once to establish access and is not transferable. For individual subscriptions, only one person at a time may access the digital version with the username and password.
Audience: While this book was once intended for pharmacologists, it is now a superb source of information for all healthcare professionals and a must for practitioners and students seeking training in the therapeutics of drug use.
Purpose: As the editors state, the purpose of this textbook was "to correlate pharmacology with related medical sciences, to re-interpret the actions and uses of drugs in light of advances in medicine and the basic biomedical sciences, to emphasize the applications of pharmacodynamics to therapeutics, and to create a book that will be useful to students of pharmacology and physicians alike."
Content: The book is broadly divided into 15 sections and 2 appendices. Different sections contain between 1 and 12 chapters each. A total of 65 chapters were written by 99 authors, representing world-renowned experts. Every chapter in the electronic version begins with a table of contents section, while each section of a chapter is linked to other sections of the same chapter; the references are linked to PubMed.
As expected, both the text and electronic versions provide comprehensive and concise information for different therapeutic drug classes. Organ systems and disease entities are discussed in the context of pharmacotherapeutics. In addition, basic principles of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, as well as drug transporters, drug metabolism, and pharmacogenomics (as new chapters), are included. Application of the basic principles of pharmacology to the care of individual patients is discussed in a new chapter entitled "The Science of Drug Therapy." The first appendix contains principles of prescription order writing and patient compliance, whereas the second is a table with pharmacokinetic data.
Usability: With its design, this book and its user-friendly digital version, which allows for frequent updates, is an easy-to-use source of comprehensive, concise, and high-quality information in pharmacology.
Highlights: Most chapters have been extensively revised, with a few consolidated or eliminated from previous editions. Besides new editors, there are also new authors. Despite the large number of authors, the editors' claim that every effort was made to assure uniformity throughout the chapters appears to be accurate. High-quality figures and tables complement the text. Although this textbook has historically been published every 5-6 years, the current digital edition allows for biweekly updates at the publisher's Web site, including new drug developments and approvals. As further evidence for an increased emphasis on therapeutics, clinical summaries at the end of chapters discuss essential concepts related to the clinical application of drugs. In the digital version, an advanced search engine, PDA "cut and paste" capability, and hyperlinked references, as well as links to other McGraw-Hill resources, allow for efficient and broad-based information retrieval. For instance, Diagnosaurus provides differential diagnosis of symptoms, signs, and diseases.
Limitations: Within the textbook, it might be desirable to have a dedicated chapter about therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) and to complement the pharmacokinetic data table in the appendix with additional TDM information, such as specimen type, optimal collection time, and therapeutic and toxic drug concentrations. Although some of this information is presented throughout the text, it is not readily accessible in one place. The digital version shares some of the limitations common to other electronic textbooks. For instance, figures and tables are not always designed for optimal printing. Likewise, the text is presented in the middle column of the screen without an option to increase the viewing area by hiding one or both neighboring columns containing linkage information.
Comparison with Other Related Books: Despite availability of other major pharmacology textbooks, Goodman and Gilman's remains the gold standard in the field.
Reviewer's Summary: This textbook with its complementary digital version is an outstanding resource at a reasonable price. The digital version's extensive links to McGraw-Hill's medical Web sites with an easy-to-use design provide for quick, convenient, and comprehensive information retrieval.
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