|  | | | The books contained in this section are specialist medical and scientific textbooks. They are likely to assume a high level of prior scientific and/or medical knowledge and, as such, are not recommended for most lay readers. Where a topic offers a more basic treatment, this is indicated.
No payment has been received by Leukaemia Research for any reviews, although in some cases the publication was supplied free of charge by the publisher.
 | | | The Cancer Chemotherapy Handbook | | Price guide: £29.99 | | Publisher details:Mosby | | ISBN: 0323018904 | | Readership: Medical Practitioners, Nurses, Pharmacists and other health-care professionals | Description: This is a compact book - for once the description handbook is realistic! It would comfortably fit into the pocket of a white-coat or nurses uniform. Although it does not pretend to be an exhaustive textbook, it does offer much more than just a catalogue of cancer drugs and the disease for which they are used. The handbook is relatively inexpensive and should be comfortably affordable for any ward or department dealing with oncology patients.
The present (2003) edition includes, for example, imatinib (Gleevec) and bortezomib (Velcade), which are both very recently introduced drugs. This is only the sixth edition in 24 years, the fifth edition came out in 1997 - given the rate of introduction of new drugs it may be necessary for the publishers to consider the merits of a linked web site to maintain currency of information. If the next edition were delayed till 2009 one can imagine that it would be very out-of-date. It is very easy to recommend the handbook to its target readership at present - in a year or two it may well be out of currency.
This is an American text, which is mainly revealed in those sections which relate to drug licensing, reporting of adverse effects and other regulatory aspects. The book would benefit from a table cross-referencing generic drug names against tradenames, overall, the handbook seems to live up to its claim to be "the world's most comprehensive portable resource. |
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 | | | Clinical Oncology | | Price guide: £132 | | Publisher details:Elsevier/Churchill Livingstone | | ISBN: 0443066299 | | Readership: Medical Practitioners, Nurses, Pharmacists and other health-care professionals | Description: This is an exhaustive coverage of the topic; the list of contributors alone is 12 pages long. The first section of the book, just under 700 pages, is devoted to the science of clinical oncology. This is comprehensive, but accessible - I would have found this invaluable when undertaking my recent MSc in Clinical Oncology.
The next section deals with problems common to cancer and its therapy - this deals with issues such as cancer pain, cachexia, infections and paraneoplastic syndromes. It takes up over 600 pages and can be recommended both as a practical guide and as a teaching aid, since it discusses the aetiology and pathophysiology of conditions before moving on to management.
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