Anthony Pane and Peter Simcock

Elsevier, Churchill Livingstone, New York, NY, March 2005, £19.99 ISBN 0443101124

Practical Ophthalmology: A survival guide for doctors and optometrists is a book aimed at primary care, junior doctors, medical students, and optometrists. It aims to provide the reader with a practical and assessable guide, which aims to guide the reader towards the diagnosis, management, or referral by means of flow charts and lucid text. The book addresses six important complaints in great details including visual loss, red eye, ocular trauma, diplopia/strabismus, watery, itchy or gritty eye, and abnormal appearance of the eye or eyelids. It then briefly discusses a host of other ocular complaints including flashes and floaters, visual distortion and visual field loss. It provides a list of critical points about all these condition in the starting of the book and then repeats them at the start of each section. This book in brief, therefore, provides a trainee with a quick ready-made examination plan, which will provide them with a plausible list of differential diagnosis. I therefore feel that this book would find its place in the pockets of a lot of junior doctors, optometrists, and other trainees who are looking for a quick differential diagnosis and concise action plan when seeing ophthalmic emergencies for the first time. Two things set this book apart from others, namely a list of critical issues and secondly the flow charts that make reference easy and quick.