Harrison's Neurology in Clinical Medicine. First Edition.

The diseases, disorders, and problems related to the central and peripheral nervous system are numerous and diverse, requiring an adequate knowledge of the biochemistry , cell biology, neuroscience, and psychology associated with the nervous system. Due to the breadth of knowledge required for neurology, Hauser provides a comprehensive, organized, and clinical approach to understanding the nervous system that extracts neurological information from Harrison's Internal Medicine and supplies more information pertinent to clinical conditions surrounding the nervous system. The book is written primarily for clinicians and medical students wanting to broaden their knowledge of the neurologi-cal system, providing practical and informative descriptions of numerous neurological disorders and offering suggested detection techniques, therapies, and medications. Hauser begins by describing technical and clinical methods for determining the cause of neurological problems. The third chapter, describing the techniques available to visualize neurological disorders and the application of these techniques to the various disorders, provides a lucid and logical approach to understanding these fascinating techniques. The following section deals with common symptoms that patients might express to their clinicians and tests that can be performed to narrow down the root of the problem. The book provides a broad perspective on many symptoms related to neurological disorders, including physical pain (headaches, neck/back pain), sensory problems (hearing, sight, taste), motor problems (hand-eye coordination, walking patterns), cerebral symptoms (dizziness, memory loss), and some psychiatric symptoms. Hauser proceeds to sequentially describe disorders from five broad areas in neurology: central nervous system diseases and disorders, nerve and muscle diseases, chronic fatigue syndromes and fibromyal-gia, psychiatric disorders, and substance abuse addiction diseases. In each area, Hauser stresses the diseases' symptoms, causes (including some molecular-level detail), and common treatment procedures. One interesting note, presumably not found in Harrison's Internal Medicine, is the numerous , smaller divergences in neurology pursued by Hauser, including prion disease, effects of HIV on the nervous system, auto-immune diseases of the nervous system, and uncommon cancers of the nervous system. Although the book was written primarily for clinicians, as an academic researcher dealing with neuroscience, I found the book to have several interesting clinical insights into disorders caused by molecular processes. The book provides a helpful reference for clinical application of scientific research. In regard to this, Hauser provides scientific or clinical research references for further study at the end of each chapter. For students and practitioners of medicine, the book is well-organized into large disorder subgroups so …