Okay, so I am working through the "drugs" section of the book, and I reach Chapter 122, which is Neuropharmacolgogy and Psychopharmacology. This begins with Antipsychotics, which is quite a concise overview of this category of drugs - helpful. Then it goes on to antidepressants... but this bit is not so readable. It throws a few really biochemical sentences and pictures with hardly any context, and I don't come away with the sense of having learnt anything useful.
I am now hungry for some information about anti-depressants. So although I intended to work through the sections of the book in the order that they are presented, I skip to the symptoms section... Chapter 157 - Depression. Which is another readable concise chapter, which briefly touches on therapeutics in a single 10-line paragraph. This refers me to Figure 157-3, and I look for this figure with great hope that it will summarise therapeutic treatment of depression for me... I can't really find it... and then I discover it... not what I was expecting really... it was a picture of some pills, with a caption which reads "When planning the pharmacological management of depression, providers should consider medications' effectiveness, tolerability and safety profile to minimize side effects and avoid drug interactions." Now as a "provider", this is precisely what I would like to do, but it seems like this humungous 1475-page reference book on palliative medicine is not giving me the information I require to make those considerations.
I look back to the contents page again, to try to figure out just how the chapters are organised... and then I chance upon a Chapter 130 which is on Antidepressants and psychostimulants! I turn to this chapter, and finally I find some useful information about the various anti-depressants.
Okay, so I look back at the contents page again... to see if I have missed out any other chapters on depression and anti-depressants. I haven't found any more for now, but I won't be surprised if I came back to this book next week and found another one that I missed today.
Now, these three separate chapters on depression and anti-depressants are written by totally different people from three totally different places - Ohio, Ireland and Canada. One would have thought that they should co-ordinate the chapters that are on similar topics. And none of these chapters actually pointed you to the other relevant chapters with overlapping material.
Then a thought occurs to me - I did say in my last post that the plus-point of this book was that it came with online access with a search function. So I went online to search for "depression", and the results were disappointing. The first 10 results point me only to chapter 157 but not to the other two chapters. Then I spot a line on the top that says "Do you mean depressive disorder?" Aha! That must be it, if I search for "depressive disorder" instead, that would do the trick... alas, even that did not point me to either of the other two chapters. So as a result, I have to take back what I said in the previous post about using the online access to find all the chapters which are relevant to the topic you want to read up on. Disappointing... there was so much promise...
Anyway, here's what I think so far: The book has too many authors - a staggering 403 authors from 23 countries. I know it's a big reference book, but even so, with 403 authors, it does make the book a bit bitty.
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