Clinical Chemistry in Practical Medicine

This is a completely revised edition of a British text, which aims to provide the physician with the logic behind laboratory determinations, the correct way of performing them and their use in arriving at correct diagnosis and therapy. The aim is praiseworthy but not original. The shelf of pamphlets, booklets, books and two volume treatises on this subject has been growing rapidly over the years. Yet their common aim, that of integrating laboratory and clinical medicine, is far from being realized. The average medical student becomes slightly bewildered during his preclinical biochemistry courses and then proceeds to forget both the useful and the useless information he has acquired. In his clinical years and during hospital residence he falls into the habit of "ordering" tests. Thereafter a chemical determination becomes a number—glucose 80, urea 15 and the like; the more such numbers a patient's chart possesses, the "better" is the "case