The Cardiology Rotation

An ideal text for your cardiology rotation and board review, The Cardiology Rotation gives you the big picture. This comprehensible text, simply and clearly written by an experienced teacher and practicing cardiologist, provides medical students and house officers with:

• Emphasis on pathophysiology, mechanism of disease, and the physical exam
• A "how-to" approach complete with charts, tables, and figures
• A clear and readable writing style
• A concise handbook format perfect for rapid retrieval of information
• A special appendices featuring board-formatted Q&A and practice ECGs

This book, created for medical students and house officers, provides an overview of cardiovascular medicine. You need only five evenings to master this information and all the information you need for the board exam and your cardiology rotation is here! Cardiology for Rotations emphasizes the pathophysiology of heart diseases and physical diagnosis, which are critical areas for physicians working with patients with heart disease. Management is also reviewed, with the work-up and treatment outlined in tables whenever possible. Cardiology is great sport, mainly because of the interesting and logical pathophysiology of heart disease. Cardiologists tend to think of themselves as physiologists. (Despite the plumbing work we do, we are still cognitive physicians .) This text calls attention to the basic science necessary for understanding heart disease, but is limited to the science that is clinically relevant. For example, action potential and cellular electrophysiology are interesting, but have little direct clinical application. Therefore, they are not reviewed here. Alternatively, reentry and automaticity are key to understanding a variety of cardiac arrhythmias, and you need to understand these mechanisms. As a practicing doctor, I have spent the last twenty years in the trenches taking care of patients and teaching medical students and house officers. Trust me to sort through the basic science coda and review the pathophysiology that will make complex issues easier to understand. A comprehension of the information in these chapters will put you on par with the knowledge of most senior residents (in just 5 evenings). Of course, each individual patient deserves additional study of the illness afflicting him or her. For this, use more comprehensive cardiology texts from the library. I advise you not to buy an encyclopedic text early in your career, as they are hard to read, terribly expensive, and out of date in a couple of years. A one-month cardiology rotation is your opportunity to learn to read ECG s. Ideally, there may be a formal ECG reading experience with an attending. If not, consider the text, 150 Practice ECG s, which provides an introductory manual plus enough practice tracing to become proficient. There is little overlap with this book and the two books together would constitute an adequate curriculum for the cardiology rotation.