Kochar’s Clinical Medicine for Students

Kochar's Clinical Medicine for Students serves as an excellent segue for the third-year medical student who must start learning how to apply knowledge in a practical fashion on the wards. The book has 3 main sections: "Key Manifestations and Presentations of Diseases," "Diseases and Disorders," and "Ambulatory Medicine." By dividing the topic of internal medicine into these main categories rather than by organ system alone, the book already has a leg up on others of its kind. It prepares the medical students to recognize the common presentations of a disease and to learn about the differential diagnosis, then provides information about the diagnosis itself. The book also separates inpatient and outpatient medicine topics, providing complete overviews of each.The chapters in the second section that discuss individual diseases are thorough and fully adequate. Rather than dishing out short quick answers to the questions that attending physicians may ask, the book provides a careful detailing of each disease. The information on the management of each disease is particularly effective, with well-balanced descriptions that provide the broad concepts of management while also providing specific details on laboratory value cutoffs and dosages only when generally applicable.(Review of the Fifth Edition, Journal of American Medical Association, January 21, 2009)