consumer guides

Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide is an excellent source of information on medical topics for the common people. Written in plain, simple English, the book gives information on diseases, their prevention and treatment, when to call the doctor and when to try home remedies, and how best to deal with certain ailments for which there is no cure available. The book has many easy to understand flow-charts and numerous illustrations of body parts and their locations, many of which are in color. From expert advice to home remedies, from pregnancy and childbirth to living will and how to deal with death, from drug interaction to important telephone numbers, the book has it all.

I found the book so useful that I bought a second copy and gave it as a gift to my daughter who has her own family. One important advantage of the book is that it will never go out of date as a supplementary online version is available which always includes the latest medical theories and developments.

The only negative point is the book's quality of binding. For a book that thick (1288 pages), the binding is not strong. Both the copies I bought broke at the spine in a few days! The contents of the book deserves a 5 stars rating. But because of its poor binding, I am giving it 4 stars.

I bought this book because I wanted a reference guide for all of the health concerns I have and may have. Its incredibly thorough and its easy to use. The only criticism I have is that no matter what symptoms you have, the book's answer to everything is to see a doctor. It might be helpful for them to go more into detail on what you can do about something before you go in, or home remedies.

A visit to the doctor always makes us very conscious of how much time is wasted. The time you take off from work, the time you spend in the waiting room the time you spend waiting for the doctor to come and actually talk to you for a few minutes. Then we find ourselves sudden incapable of describing accurately our aches and pains. This all happens after we finally decide to go see a doctor because we are not sure if we know enough to deal with the problem on our own. Calling your mother to find out what to do is not always an option. The "Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide" is a great help for dealing with health concerns in this Era of Managed Care. The volume deals with information about diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease in all stages of life. The information is presented in a very user-friendly manner, with over 900 illustrations, covering: (1) questions to discuss with your doctor; (2) first-aid and emergency advice; (3) symptom charts to determine if and when to call the doctor; (4) home remedies and alternative medicine; and (5) drug-interaction charts to prevent dangerous drug-drug, drug-food, and drug-herb interactions.

I have used this book to save myself from a trip to the doctor, to identify a rash on one of my children, and to better understand my father's hearing problems. This "Family Health Guide" has proven itself both useful and easy to use, and I am someone who never took even biology in school and who therefore finds medicine to be as mysterious as any other science. Every household should have this book, or something very much like it. One final advantage of this particular volume is that this "book" never goes out of date because you can get page and index searched for updated information on every entry from a website.