Forfar and Arneil’s Textbook of Paediatrics - 6th edition

The other week I was in the middle of a busy surgery when one of our receptionists came through with a message from our midwife. One of our new babies had colic and she had heard of good results from “Colief” – could I prescribe it as a trial? A quick look in MIMS revealed that the preparation was actually lactase and it was licensed only for lactase deficiency which can occur rarely as a primary illness or more commonly secondary to and following gastroenteritis. As far as I could see, there was no reason to suspect that this 7 day old baby had lactase deficiency; in particular it had no diarrhoea so I asked the receptionist to relay the news that I wouldn’t be prescribing “Colief” after all. Then I decided to find out a bit more about lactase deficiency. After all, forewarned is forearmed as they say. As luck would have it, page 674 of this book told me all I needed to know about lactase deficiency and a quick trip to page 693 summarised the evidence based therapeutic options for infantile colic, now that dicyclomine is no longer available.

This hard-backed book of nearly 2000 pages contains contributions from paediatricians and specialists nationally and internationally. Indeed I was heartened to find that a good number of them were colleagues from my home town of Leeds, including Drs Chris Hobbs and Jayne Wynne writing definitively on Child Abuse and Dr Simon Newell discussing neonatal enteral feeding. It is widely regarded as being the standard textbook of Paediatrics. The book begins with an explanation of evidence based medicine as it is applied to paediatrics followed by some paediatric epidemiology and a chapter on history taking and examination which is incredibly thorough and informative – plenty of useful tips for GPs here. Each subsequent chapter is preceded by an index (enabling the reader to rapidly locate information required) and is followed by a list of references.

I’d like to be able to tell you that the CD ROM which comes with the book ran on my PC without a hitch but I can’t. Although it appeared to install properly, I couldn’t get it to run. What was somewhat irksome was that it did install on my wife’s inferior machine and run with no bother whatever! How smug was she?!! Technical support were duly emailed and whilst they replied within 48 hours as promised and offered helpful suggestions; at the time of writing I’d still not got it going.

The entire textbook is on the CD ROM together with facilities to view all the images from a chapter which can be enlarged, printed, viewed as a slideshow or made into a PowerPoint Presentation. Other useful features include an intelligent search facility which displays the results as links to the chapters including the keyword. Previously viewed chapters are recorded in the History, so the last 20 chapters visited can be accessed using the History button.

I only have one minor quibble – the monochrome photographs of skin lesions and rashes should be ditched. They are useless and out of place in a book of this stature and price. That aside, the book is superb and worthy of its reputation as the standard paediatric reference.

Publisher:	Elsevier
	ISBN 0443071926

Price:	£150

Reviewer:	Dr Jeremy Sager, May 2004