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Pulmonary Medicine: Pulmonary Emergencies
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Alan M. Fein, Michael S. Niederman, and Gerald M. Brody; eds. 236 pages. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann; 1994. $49.95.
Not long ago, emergency departments were staffed by rotating medical house officers. Today, emergency departments are run by specialists in emergency medicine and their trainees. They have to know a great deal and must be able to act rapidly in widely various situations, which they usually do well. The problems covered in the 12 chapters of this book are interesting and important, but few will be unfamiliar to the experienced physician who has learned by doing. With few exceptions, no new insights or scholarly evaluations of the medical literature are included here that will lead to informed action. One exception is a thoughtful discussion of thromboembolism that includes what is known about the various tests for deep venous thrombosis. The description of lesions of the upper airways is somewhat didactic but does provide information not readily available elsewhere. By and large, however, the brief coverage of such complicated subjects as pulmonary edema adds little to the knowledge most physicians must already have, and reviews of topics such as hemoptysis fail to synthesize the current understanding in a critical way.
Although this book may provide a useful introduction to some of the important pulmonary emergencies, it falls short of being a textbook and lacks the scholarship and depth of the two recent issues of Clinics in Chest Medicine (March and September 1994) on the same subject.
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