FIELD GUIDE TO CLINICAL DERMATOLOGY - International Journal of Dermatology 2000;39:400

Reviewed by Marcia Ramos e Silva, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Dermatology
HUCFF-UFRJ - Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

David H. Frankel. Ed.
Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, 1999. 220 pages.

David Frankel's Field Guide to Clinical Dermatology is a small and very complete book intended mainly for the primary-care practitioner but also very useful for the busy dermatologist in the office or hospital. Its content includes how to diagnosis, manage and treat the most common dermatological disorders.

It is an update with good color pictures, hints and main problems for the diagnosis, and how to overcome these difficulties of diagnosis and therapy.

This book is meant to be used when the physician is actually seeing the patient and have a disease to diagnose and treat. The unique way its chapters are divided allow the reader to use it as a working manual, as Frankel says in his preface. The "unorthodox" organization of the content, reflecting mainly two categories, first: what the patient says, and second: what the doctor sees, also helps to use it when the physician is consulting the patient. With this way of dividing the text it is very easy to classify the disease the patient is presenting and to find out about how to confirm its diagnosis and how to treat it. The Guide to the Book, which is a little different from the Table of Contents, must be read and understood before beginning to use it because it makes the search of the specific dermatosis of a patient much easier.

The book is well illustrated and almost schematic. Each chapter is divided into Symptoms and signs, Differential diagnosis, How to make the diagnosis, Treatment and Prognosis. All of them also contain the number of the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) of each cutaneous disease focused.

There is a special and very useful first chapter on the Proper use of topical corticosteroids, meant as a warning to the general physician and all specialists. Even dermatologists sometimes forget about their potential side effects.

Dermatologists hope that with this book the primary-care practitioners are able to diagnose and treat the most common dermatoses and make the difference between the ones they must send to the specialist before using incorrect drugs. This way the hard time dermatologists have with previous medicated cutaneous disorders, badly diagnosed and wrongly treated by the general physician, can be avoided or minimized.

The Field Guide to Clinical Dermatology is a book that, besides for the general practitioner and other specialists, is worth having, even for dermatologists, for a rapid consultation.