NEJM Clinical Problem-Solving

The New England Journal of Medicine put a collection of interesting clinical vignettes into a book titled Clinical Problem-Solving, editors Sanjay Saint, Jeffrey Drazen, and Caren Solomon. Basically, it is a compilation of previously published cases on NEJM. I found it really educational in thinking about how experts approach difficult unknown diseases. How do you take a good history? What do you look for on exam? How do you interpret labs? I love looking at the differentials and how they're formed. The most obvious way is to list diseases by likelihood, but experts also think about the things that are most serious and dangerous in the patient (even if unlikely). These cases are oddball cases: usually rare presentations of common diseases, and sometimes common presentations of rare diseases. They're written for practicing physicians, and as such, they are not good for Boards prep (in case this post is misinterpreted as such). But they are very cool and probably useful for the wards when we might be called upon to explain our clinical reasoning.

Image from Amazon UK, shown under fair use.