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Book Recommendations for Hospital Medicine


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About to finish my second year as a hospitalist PA, I thought it'd be useful to compile an updated thread on useful texts. Please feel free to add your own thoughts, recommendations, and reviews.

What I carry:

Maxwell's- rarely use but good for dermatomes, measuring JVP, and nice pupil markings

Sanford Guide- I find to be an essential quick reference. Use it several times a week at least

Pocket Medicine- becoming obsolete with uptodate but nice to read on the elevator in route to the ED for an admission

Epocrates (free version)- on my phone. Use multiple times daily for dosages, pharmacology, and packaging/dispensing units

 

Personal 4 x 6 notebook- I've cut and taped various useful bits on information from 2 different hospital "intern survival guides" (electrolyte repletion suggestions, pressor choices and doseages, insulin/heparin gtt titration etc, ICU resident pager #, outpatient clinic #s for f/u)

Hard-Copy Texts...

If I'm reading at home and not specifically about a single diagnosis, I find this to be much more enjoyable if it's presented in a case story format

Internal Medicine Casebook: Real Patients, Real Answers- Highly recommend. Goes through the bread and butter of hospitalist medicine as well as some zebras

 

Bouncebacks! Emergency Department Cases: ED Returns- Read this in about 24 hours after it was recommended in the PA student forum. Quite enjoyable. You haven't been practicing long enough if you've never missed a diagnosis. It's quite humbling, and this book provides a good reminder.

 

Symptom to Diagnosis: An Evidence Based Guide- This one is geared for PA students interested in hospital medicine or in preparation for inpatient medicine rotations.

 

Books I regret buying:

The Hospitalist Manual (Mehta/Matthews)- Has an ok section on procedures but I really didn't come away with much else.

 

Medicine (Current Clinical Strategies Medical Book)- A pocketbook of admission orders. It was cheap and would be good for a student on internal medicine, but I haven't used it once.

 

I feel like I'm always recommending this... but if you're interested in hospitalist medicine, I'd highly recommend subscribing (free) to physician's firstwatch where top journal articles are condensed to 2-3 sentence summaries: firstwatch.jwatch.org... especially if you're working at an academic institution.

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washington manual for internal medicine

 

cecils's textbook of medicine-much easier to read than harrison's with less trivial fluff.

 

tarascon pharmacopeia. I have a copy for each labcoat for each job. it just sucks not knowing what a medicine is when a pt says " oh yeah and I take 12.75 mg of rifitrixilin" every other day..."

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  • 1 month later...

The Only EKG Book You'll Ever Need: Recommended as prereading for a CME course I'm doing this week. Was not impressed and would not recommend purchasing. Bored during most of the reading (could have benefited from more 12 leads interspersed to keep things interesting). The one shining area that it did do a better job than most was explaining how to recognize fasicular blocks.

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  • 7 months later...

Tarascon Internal Medicine & Critical Care Pocketbook: Love the toxicologyand renal sections

 

Tarascon Hospital Medicine Pocketbook: Has a nice RCRI section for pre-op evaluation, expanded GI/pulm/ID sections

 

Noting that there is a lot of redundancy between the two above, I think I might actually stop carrying Pocket Medicine with these (blasphemy I know).

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  • 5 years later...

I'd like to bump this back up into play.  I'm seeking a really comprehensive textbook to utilize (and prepare) for hospital medicine.  Anything new out there?

 

 

I think you'll find the best textbooks to prepare for an IM rotation are either Harrison's or Cecil's.  Every physician has read one of those two in their residencies.  It's not practical to have with you on the wards, but it's a great reference text.

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