An Insider's Guide to the Medical Specialties

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.

• 1. Cardiology ; 2. High Dependency Medicine ; 3. Poisoning ; 4. Endocrinology & Lipids ; 5. Diabetes & Obesity ; 6. Hypertension & Nephrology ; 7. Neurology ; 8. Stroke Medicine ; 9. Infectious Diseases ; 10. Hepatology ; 11. Gastroenterology ; 12. Respiratory Medicine ; 13. Oncology ; 14. Haematology ; 15. Palliative Care Medicine ; 16. Gerontology ; 17. Rheumatology ; 18. Immunology ; 19. Dermatology ; 20. Obstetric Medicine ; 21. Liaison Psychiatry

The style is both informal and informative, and provides a refreshing change from both 'bullet point' pocket handbooks and heavier specialist tomes. If the editors' aim is to provide interesting glimpses through the different facades of medicine in a relaxed bedtime or armchair read, these authors have got the formula just right.