Instant Pharmacology

  • Kourosh Saeb-Parsy,
  • Ravi G Assomull,
  • Fakhar Z. Khan,
  • Kasra Saeb-Parsy &
  • Eamonn Kelly
Wiley: 1999. 349pp $34.95, £19.99, (pbk)

New in paperback Forbidden Drugs, 2nd edn

  • Philip Robson
Oxford University Press, £12.99

Writers of undergraduate medical textbooks have a knowledge and enthusiasm for their subject that often results in a massive book, intimidating students with its size, depth and breadth. Instant Pharmacology is a novel departure from this because its writers are students themselves.

The book also departs from the standard format of pharmacology texts. The first section, which describes the basic principles of drug action, is followed by sections on the principles of chemical transmission and the mechanisms of drug action on the different body systems. Next comes a dictionary of drugs, set out in alphabetical order of generic drug name. The final section is a set of questions and answers designed to aid self-directed learning.

The book is appealing because it is concise and shorter than many of the current major textbooks. The dictionary of drugs is a useful way of locating information on a particular drug. The format lends itself to the systems-based approach to medicine that many medical schools are now adopting, and the actions of drugs are successfully placed in the relevant clinical contexts. No doubt, students will like the idea that their peers have written the text with a view to removing all that is not core material.

Some problems, however, arise from the novel format and the content. The text contains features that are likely to mislead or confuse the student reader. For example, the peptide hormones angiotensin and bradykinin have been classified as neuropeptides, and the duration of warfarin's action is attributed to the rate of catabolism of clotting factors rather than to the half-life of the drug.

One of the problems that students new to pharmacology encounter is the sheer volume of drug names. An introductory text should concentrate on mechanisms of action and provide only main examples of each type or sub-type of mechanism. But Instant Pharmacology has numerous examples of each mechanism in some areas and few in others.

There are tensions between the main text and the dictionary. The main text is not very informative about the mechanisms of action of some drug classes, and the dictionary contains information that more logically would have been placed in the text, since it relates to the mechanism of action. In other cases, the text is merely repeated in the dictionary.

There is a place in the market for a concise introductory pharmacology text. It remains to be seen whether students will appreciate the novel approach in this book.