Practical Atlas of Pseudomalignancy: Benign Lesions Mimicking Malignancy

Rating:
Summary: A Must for diagnosticians...
Review: The book is one-of-a-kind. It has collected the experiences from innumerable mistakes, near-misses and pitfalls in one of the important branches in diagnostic medicine in one tasteful book.
It is easy to find your way around in. The book is well indexed. The clues to alternative diagnoses are displayed logically, but it takes you some time and thought to really appreciate what the differences are, the reasons for which is obvious: otherwise the entities would not appear in this book!
I think the included look-alikes entities are well chosen. The practitioner will meet the problems often, in my experience at least monthly. Probably we do it even more often, without realising that we should have given more thought to the alternatives. Therefore it will pay to go through the book when you buy it, which you should, to be aware of what sore experiences colleagues before us have made.
SO why not five stars?
The quality is a bit variable between chapters, although none are poor, though! On one occasion identical pictures have been used to illustrate two different conditions. The organisation of the entities within the individual chapters is not always quite "logical". On the other hand - is that possible? Probably not. The intention of the book is above all to warn us against the most common howlers with serious consequences in diagnostic pathology, and help us out. An organ system approach alone might be enough.
So I may go to four stars and a moon!
When you have got it, you will not wish to be without it again. The book deserves to be read to pieces.
And hopefully Drs Al-Sam and Lakhani will repeat their "Course on Pseudomalignancies" again soon. If you are lucky, register early that is, you will get it for free!!!!!!!!!!
But don't bet on that - there are many smart pathologists around that will nick your copy.
Have a good time with this book and become a better and more reflective pathologist.