Pain Medicine: An Essential Review

2 pages per topic. Very superficial review

On its face, the book probably deserves 3.5 or 4 out of 5 stars, as it is concise and informative. However, regularly-noted factual and conceptual errata along with periodic syntax issues beg a sorely-needed re-edit to make this book a viable reference.

This is a good, solid review book. A big flaw is how poorly organized the chapters are. It's organized by general, psychology, anatomy, procedures, clinical diagnoses. It would be nice if anatomy, procedures, and clinical diagnoses were all put together, instead of having to refer back and forth. The other big flaw is much information is missing from such a large book, almost 600 pages and there are important sections missing, like neurosurgical procedures for example. Not much missing, but it's a flaw. Good to use with Dr Huntoon's Q&A and boardvitals.com. A larger reference like the ASIPP Clinical Aspects book may also be helpful, since it's a complete book without the extranious/convoluted research material found in pain textbooks that is not necessary for everyday practice and board review.

I have reviewed almost every pain book possible during the course of residency/fellowship/practice. This is by far the most COMPLETE while being extremely CONCISE. It reads more like a POCKET BOOK, which is more useful in real practice because when you're preparing for a procedure or want to review a specific medication, you don't want endless pages on it. You want what's truly relevant. Has some pretty nice pictures and fluoro images. Now that I'm in practice, the interventional procedures portion has become a great resource. Would recommend pairing with a good atlas. A lot of useful basic pain physiology, anatomy, assessment stuff for fellows as well.

Great review book. I am pain physician and an anesthesiologist by training. I have been in practice 4 years now. I used to use the Faust Anesthesia Review textbook when I was an anesthesia resident. This book has a similar style with very short (2-3 page) high-yield chapters that are easy to flip to and review. I am using it at least 3 times per week and it is great. Would recommend this to any Pain Fellow and Attending, or any anesthesia resident interested in pain.

Succinct and engaging to read, with helpful images.

I really wanted to like this book. Based off some of the glowing reviews I decided to purchase it as a prep book for fellowship. It has been a disappointment. It is poorly organized, very superficial, and poorly written with tons of gramatical and spelling errors. Many of the sections are completely worthless and contain little to no useful information. For example in the assessment of pain section the chapters are organized by body region, a good idea in principal. However they list every physical exam test under the son. To the point that it’s unreadable. Also the pain assessment tools section is just ridiculous. Why not focus on the most important and include some diagrams instead of listing the myriads of questionnaires. The EMG section has no useful diagrams and is poorly written, the imaging sections are horrible..I can go on and on. Overall the book is meh, wish I had purchased something different.

Good review book for Pain Medicine. It does well summarizing a variety of subjects in a clear and concise manner. Not the best book for reviewing for the Pain Boards as it doesn't go into sufficient detail (I'd recommend a good, recent Q&A book for that purpose), but a nice review of an extremely broad field of medicine.