An Insider's Guide to the Medical Specialties

As medicine becomes more specialized, doctors working in general medicine and general practice can quickly lose touch with advances occurring in other fields. Never having heard of an investigation, or carrying dated misconceptions as to a prognosis can be frustrating at best, and dangerous at worst. The aim of this book is to strike a balance between refreshing old knowledge and updating the reader on significant advances that have occurred in a particular specialty, with this in mind each chapter is written by a trainee and a specialist in the relevant area. The content will be of interest to consultants and trainees in the medical specialties, general practitioners, and medical students. At times entertaining, irreverant and controversial, this is not a book to be left nestling in the pocket of a white coat or gathering dust on a shelf.

Dr Ian Reckless has been a Specialist Registrar in General Medicine since 2003. He has a particular interest in the quality of health services and the ways in which services are delivered. In addition to his clinical post, Ian has spent time as clinical adviser to the Healthcare Commission (the healthcare inspectorate in England) and working at the Department of Health. Dr John Reynolds was an undergraduate at Cambridge and a clinical student at Oxford, qualifying in 1981. After training posts in Bath, Newcastle, and Cambridge he returned to Oxford to undertake a DPhil in neuropharmacology. He was appointed Consultant Physician and Clinical Pharmacologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital in 1997 and is an honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Oxford. For the last 4 years he has been Medical Director of Division A at the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust and is currently Chairman of the Pharmaceutical Panel of the NHS Health Technology Assessment programme.