Reviewer: Martin C. Yorath, DPM (Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science)
Description: This is an interesting little book, written as part of the expanding Pocket Notebook series now covering several specialties, and is presented in ring binder format, with hard covers designed to stand up to the rigors of being pulled in and out of residents' pockets frequently while working on the wards and inpatient and outpatient settings. It has easy-to-follow headings and uses tables and illustrations well to impart information some of the time.
Purpose: The purpose is to reflect current approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of a number of common and more complex foot and ankle conditions. Pocket references in any specialty are always going to be a useful addition and be of value to those in postgraduate training programs. For the most part, the objectives are met. The limitation with any book of this size is deciding what to include and what to leave out. Overall, this one does a comprehensive job.
Audience: The book is clearly aimed at those in training, and most specifically will be of use to podiatric residents and fellows in the U.S., but possibly to students, too. The authors suggest that it will of use to allied health professionals, too, but do not suggest which ones. I would doubt that it will have a very large following outside of the specialty, since a good portion of the book is devoted to surgical subjects. The authorship is somewhat known to the U.S. podiatry community, but I would not say internationally. Overall, the contributors seem to be mostly clinical and either in training themselves or involved in postgraduate training, but there is a good balance of contributions from both orthopedic and podiatric perspectives, which is encouraging to see.
Features: The best feature of this book is its practical design. It is easy to access the information it contains and it will stand up to the abuses of three years of postgraduate residency training. The book is organized by either very broad or very specific topics pertinent to clinical podiatry. Each section is well outlined and numbered at the top of each page. The weaknesses are several. There is no use of color plates, which would have been useful for the dermatology section, but would no doubt adversely affect cost. There are some areas that are not mentioned, in particular peripheral vascular disease (both arterial and venous). Some areas would have been better explained by the use of illustrations; such as the section on ankle fracture classifications. The section on physical examination is also weak beyond the focus on the foot and ankle. Findings in a general physical examination that would be of concern to a podiatrist would have been helpful to include, particularly since the book is geared towards in-training physicians versus the trained ones.
Assessment: This is a no-frills book. It is not exhaustive in its coverage; it is more of a ready reckoner type of publication. It will have an audience, but a limited one. It goes beyond student-level books such as The Pocket Podiatry Guides (Elsevier, 2009-2010) or Podiatry Student Handbook, Shi (CreateSpace, 2017). Its nearest direct competitor now is either The P. I. Manual: A Handbook of Podiatric Medicine and Surgery, 2nd edition (The Podiatry Institute, 2008), which, while bigger and also spiral bound, will not be as robust in a resident's coat pocket, or Watkins' Manual of Foot and Ankle Surgery, 4th edition, Watkins (Wolters Kluwer, 2016) which is competitively priced and available as an ebook. Unfortunately, another good resident level book, Foot and Ankle Secrets, Harkless (Hanley & Belfus, 1998) is now out of print, but is available secondhand and is still a direct competitor. The actual closest rival to this style of book goes back some 30-plus years, to a small hardcover book put out by the then Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine, The Clinical Handbook of Podiatric Medicine. Any of these books have limitations, but all would be of use to primarily residents, particularly in the PGY-1 level of training, and so can be recommended reservedly for that purpose.