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| Domesticating the black dog |
6-May-2008 |
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Book Reviews
Journeys with the Black Dog:
Inspirational stories of
Bringing Depression to Heel
Edited by Tessa Wigney,
Gordon Parker and Kerrie
Eyers
Reviewed by Dr June Canavan
Depression is common but still poorly understood in the community and poorly recognised by many health professionals.
The Black Dog Institute has produced another essential book for anybody involved in treating or caring for someone with depression. It will also be useful for those who have depression as they grapple to understand just what is happening to their thoughts.
Journeys with the Black
Dog contains a selection of personal stories written for a competition organised by the Black Dog Institute. While at times it may seem repetitious, the various ways to describe the ‘fog’, known here as the ‘dog’, may allow patients to find a way to identify and glean some hope and inspiration for the future.
For GPs, the book highlights how helpful or destructive we can be to patients with a mood disorder: how one size does not fit all, and how we need to listen, to delve, to be patient and to care. The narratives provide a vast landscape of descriptors used to report the same problem: it illustrates how difficult traversing the landscape can be.
I enjoyed the glimpses of humour, such as: “My sofa deserves an Oscar for the best supporting furniture in a clinically depressed episode”.
This book is a valuable resource for every GP, and should be given to every patient to read when they are first diagnosed. It will be comforting and reassuring and is written in a language that they will identify with.
Allen & Unwin, 2007, $24.95.
Learning from Medical Errors
–
Clinical Problems
By
Anh Vu T and Dung A Nguyen
Reviewed by Dr Paul Grinzi
Learning from Medical Errors is an offering in a new genre of medical education books that focus on errors. Many of these can be quite dry, but this book is clearly written to be of practical use for the primary care clinician, without getting bogged down by legal intricacies.
Written by two US-Vietnamese brothers, both family physicians, the book takes the reader through 13 chapters based on regional symptoms (such as leg pain, headache, etc). The content is written for primary care settings and each chapter begins by outlining aspects of the presentation that are important in triaging the patient, taking a history and clinically examining them.
The authors then concisely describe the diagnostic and management considerations that are important for that chapter’s topic, including both hospital and office-based treatment and common pitfalls encountered with these presentations. These sections are clearly written and easily digestible.
While the diagnostic and management summaries are very useful, the book’s strength comes in the second half of each chapter where, using more than 140 case studies, the authors point out pitfalls in management to be avoided.
As the book’s foreword states: “It is certainly human to err, but as professionals we must not let a mistake be wasted on us”. This book offers reader the opportunity to gain ‘experience’, without the trauma of repeating the mistakes of others.
Radcliffe, 2005, $61.50.
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