Oxford Handbook Of Clinical Medicine (11th Edition)
Ian B. Wilkinson, Tim Raine, Kate Wiles, Peter Hateley, Dearbhla Kelly, And Iain Mcgurgan
Honest to god this was one of the best medical books I've ever read. It doesn't overcomplicate things and it uses simple language, I think too often in academia we MAKE things overcomplicated, and justify it with "being specific". Whether this stems from elitism or just wanting to fit into the societal norms of sounding smart without actually being smart, I'm not sure. But this book does speak to the person and not to a record, it feels natural the way it is structured. It's also pretty straight to the point, to sum up an entire disease, its pathology, diagnosis, effects and mechanism of action in less than a dozen or two lines is pretty enviable. It also doesn't shy away from discussing how medicine should be practiced. Many times, doctors and health workers are taught to work through medicine as if it were mathematics, without discussing how to deal with patients, we reward med students for being able to diagnose things, but never for being able to work with patients and treat them well. The book directly tells the reader how to speak to patients, and it also doesn't censor itself on topics about societal issues like race or gender discrimination.
As Virchow said, “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing else but medicine on a large scale”. It directly calls out systemic racial discrimination in medicine in the first few pages. Most people want to separate science from politics, but to do so is extremely unwise. Science works within society and politics, and this book specifically highlights that. It is an amazing book, not just to med students but to the ordinary person. But still, the pages were super thin making it was hard to handle so 9/10.
Abijith Sivaprasad, 10-A
,
.jpg)
0 Comments