The Patient's Guide to Medical Tests: Everything You Need to Know About the Tests Your Doctor Orders

A reference guide to medical tests and procedures describes hundreds of popular tests, including reviews of money-saving home tests.

Medical tests can be intimidating, particularly if the patient is uninformed about the procedure. Written by a physician and a registered nurse, this updated guide provides basic facts on about 1,000 medical tests and terms. The alphabetically arranged entries are about a paragraph in length and usually include a description of the test, patient preparation, the procedure, the reference range of values for persons free of disease, abnormal values, cost, and special instructions or precautions. There are no illustrations, and the book does not provide much information on pain and other possible side effects. A 54-page glossary, a subject index, and a brief list of medical abbreviations and symbols are included.

Because rapidly evolving technology results in continual advances in the field of diagnostic medicine, recent knowledge must be made available. A good supplement to print sources is the MEDLINEplus Medical Encyclopedia Web site [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/encyclopedia.html], from the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health, which offers authoritative updated facts on many common medical tests as well as a wealth of other health information.

The strength of this revised edition is its currency and the number of tests included. The book is recommended for public, special, and academic libraries in need of a recent concise guide to medical tests. However, because the information is very succinct, users may want to consult other sources, such as The Yale University School of Medicine Patient's Guide to Medical Tests (2d ed., Houghton, 2002), as well. RBB
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