Surgical Recall

Book Review: Surgical Recall, 6e

Surgical Recall, 6e (2012) by Lorne H. Blackbourne MD is an 800-page handbook that is packed with very high-yield clinical information that all primary care physicians should find relevant.

The book is obviously is surgery oriented, but I find its content to be extremely relevant to all major medical specialties. Solid tumors, relevant to almost every branch of medicine, are covered particularly well. This information can be hard to find, in a condensed fashion, in many other medical review books.

Open this book when  you are done preparing for your boards in almost any specialty. You will be amazed at the wealth of critical and highly-tested information that routinely gets missed in other sources.

Surgical Recall

On the downside, this is predominantly a medical student-level surgery review book. Users who apply the internal medicine-related content to real-life situations uncritically will get their patients into a lot of trouble. For example, the proposed treatment of hypercalcemic crisis is “volume expansion with normal saline, diuresis with furosemide.” However, severely hypercalcemic patients tend to be extremely dehydrated. Furosemide would only worsen the problem and harm the patient if used at the outset. The relevant sentence needs clarification. Also, the book, which has a copyright of 2012, recommends “Zygris” for the treatment of septic shock. However, in 2011 the manufacturer withdrew Xigris, or drotrecogin alfa, from worldwide markets because of failure to demonstrate a survival benefit and because of a “question [regarding] the benefit-risk profile” of the drug.

Despite the aforementioned limitations, I recommend this medical book very highly because of its excellent coverage of surgery and related content. It is one of the best medical books of all time.

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One response to “Book Review: Surgical Recall, 6e”

  1. […] Blackbourne, Lorne H., MD FACS, Surgical Recall, 6e (2011, reviewed here) […]

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