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Conn’s Current Therapy, 2003. Edited by Robert Rakel and Edward Bope. 1,400 pp, illustrated. Philadelphia, Elsevier Science, 2003. $65.00. ISBN 0–7216-8745–8.

Lynchburg Family Practice Residency
Lynchburg, Va

Take 300 authors from 15 countries, stir in hundreds of common diseases, set the oven for "preferred management techniques," and bake for 1 year. What you have is the recipe for another new edition of Conn’s Current Therapy—one that is bigger and with different suggested approaches for care from the one before it. This trusted book is intended for all clinicians seeking to manage their patient’s illnesses with the most up-to-date guidelines, and it has been around since 1949 with little in the way of change in its user-friendly format. If you have perused a copy before, and I would venture that all of us became users of Current Therapy during medical school, then you will know what to expect. Therefore, let’s take a look at what is new with this edition.

The book is a 3/4 inch thicker with 126 more pages than last year’s edition. New topics on diseases of the head and neck, smallpox, and vision correction procedures have been added. There also appears to be an increased number of illustrations and an improvement in their quality. The editors note in their preface that 88 percent of the contributors are new and the other 12 percent have thoroughly revised their material. The editors have continued their ICD-9-code list inside the front cover. I would caution against relying on it to document office encounters. The codes are too few and too basic to describe appropriately the work most primary care physicians do (eg, there is only one code listed for hypertension and two for uncomplicated diabetes). I like to keep my copies of Current Therapy next to each other on the shelf of my bookcase so I can refer back and compare a method of treatment I previously read about and used successfully with the new recommendations. For the last several years, the editions have had matching covers with the exception of a change in color, but a minor annoyance this year is that the size, graphic design, and color have changed, so the new edition breaks up the homogeneous appearance of the book series. These are all small concerns when compared with the overall excellence of the book.

Enough "nit picking" (see Conn’s Current Therapy, 2003, p 901!) has been done by this review. Rakel and Bope have put together another practical and reliable resource for physicians who need a quick consultation about therapeutic alternatives for managing their patient’s medical problems. Current Therapy is a reference that belongs in all physicians’ libraries.

This Article Full Text (PDF) Rapid Responses: Submit a response Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when Rapid Responses are posted Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Driscoll, C. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Driscoll, C.