Product Description

This is a new, full color edition of the hugely successful pocketbook of clinical medicine based on "Kumar and Clark's Clinical Medicine". In addition to being a portable version of "Kumar and Clark", this book offers valuable added extras, such as exam questions, practical procedures, a dictionary of terms, abbreviations and normal values (on inside front and back covers) and a list of emergency boxes. The second edition of "Ballinger" got a 4 star (top) rating in a recent review in the Student BMJ. It is now also available in PDA format (download or CD access) and as a special value PDA/book package - offering the ultimate in portability, speed, and efficiency with multi-platform compatibility.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #308104 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 888 pages

Review
"There's a need for this kind of book, especially one that's good value.. Ballinger and Patchett have written a mini Kumar and Clark: a potentially valuable resource for the clinical years"Review of second edition - Student BMJ
content is excellent. It is a pocket version of Kumar and Clark's Clinical Medicine, making it a serious competitor for other textbooks.
The text is impressivley detailed and exam-orientated, including a question and answer session that is ideal for on-the-go revsion.
...an excellent text, excellently produced." "Mohammed Al-Ubaydli, National Center of Biotechnology Information, USA," Hospital Medicine, September 2003
book has been extremely useful so far on the first year of my medical course and I would recommend it with great confidence to any other medical student at any stage in their education. The book provides a very useful source of easily accessible information, in sufficient depth to allow an understanding of the necessities of a particular topic without overwhelming the reader with a mountain of facts." "First Year Medical Student on Accelerated Medical Course," Newcastle University, January 2004
is nothing bad to say about this book!" "Medical Student," Cardiff University

Customer Reviews

A must-have for clinical students
Both book and PDA versions offer a concise, readable account of Kumar & Clark's Clinical Medicine. The book is printed in a very clear style, with good use of colours to facilitate quick referencing and the highlighting of key points. The information contained focuses on the needs of the clinical medical student/house officer when on the wards- especially useful for checking-up on key areas of a given clinical situation, prior to your next ward grilling or during group revision sessions. The numerous websites listed both at the start of the book, and at the end of chapters, are good resources in themselves. Their inclusion reflects the modern approach of the book, as does the option to buy the book in a PDA version for use on handheld computers.
The PDA version is similarly easy to install and navigate. Even novice users can easily find which area of the e-book they want to read and move to the area of the book's content. Examination questions are easier to find and access than in the paper-based book, whilst, the inclusion of calculators to measure such things as the BMI is an absolute boon. Perhaps the only downside with the e-book is the lack of a search facility to complement the index.
Overall both the paper-based and PDA versions of Ballinger & Patchett are a must-have of the clinical students' library. Ballinger's & Patchett's ability to provide clear, concise information in a portable format for ward-based learning is their biggest asset.

Pass Medicine with ease
It is basically all you need to know to pass your finals. Read this book twice and your sorted. It will soon become the bible of medicine as it has less detail than the Oxford Textbook, but easier to digest and remember. Don't even consider reading the large Kumar and Clark, thats for reference only.

excellent, apart from the apalling editing
The content and length of this book is excellent -it is one of the few textbooks of internal medicine which is short enough for the average student to want to read it cover-to-cover, while still being reasonably reliable. It is uniquely well suited to 1st, 2nd or 3rd year students trying to get a grip on new subject areas, and is also useful as a concise summary later on.

My only significant criticism of the content is that the sections on presenting complaints at the beginning of each chapter are rather undersized - compare with the extremely detailed way in which the (less reliable) Mosby books approach the same area.

However, my main criticism is that the editing of this particular edition really lets the book down. You get a feeling that the book was rushed into print before this job had really been done. There is no list of topics at the beginning of each chapter, as you find in the Oxford Handbook, and the index is rather limited.

A particularly annoying feature is the way in which the sub-headings are virtually indistinguishable from the main headings - if you're flicking through the book rapidly, it makes it quite hard to spot where one disease ends and the next one begins. In my own copy, the printing quality is also variable, with some pages blurred and hard to read.