[PDF] PreTest: Family Medicine 4th Edition (2019) by Doug Knutson

Description

Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics Lecture Notes provides a clear and accessible overview of all the key prescribing topics needed for medical finals and beyond. Detailed coverage and discussion of pharmacology in a clinical context, combined with an easy-to-understand, readable style, helps improve and test understanding of pharmacological principles and reasoning on rotation and into the foundation years.

Reviews

At a digestible 261 pages this text is on power with similar titles, such as Clinical Epidemiology by Flethcer. As the title suggests however this text covers a lot of topics: ranging from an introduction to data handling and hypothesis testing to bite sized chapters on the various study designs. The later chapters on screening, diagnosis and prognosis, and economic evaluation proved invaluable to me personally. All of this is brought together in a final chapter entitled ‘Critical appraisal checklists’ which will be a particularly useful guide to anyone expected to critically analyze a study.

The language is straightforward and relatively easy to understand. Rather than long paragraphs, the author has opted for short paragraphs consisting mostly of bullet points. This allows easier assimilation of the most important information and lives up to the ‘Crash Course’ title. Interspersed throughout the book, easy to understand diagrams, tables and charts further help to break up the text and illustrate the authors points.

Evidence-Based Medicine: Reading and Writing Medical Papers is an excellent resource for anyone studying an epidemiology module as part of their course. I personally struggled with the subject previously but this text has made some complicated ideas and principles a lot easier to understand.