[sports2245]

Our clinical instructor wants us to get a book that gives signs/symptoms for diagnoses. She didn't give us any titles or authors. Does anyone have any suggestions for any good books? Thanks in advance.

[kasia2]

Proffesional guide to diseases by Springhouse looks like a good book, you can purchase at Borders bookstore...

[Daytonite]

There are a couple of books on the market that I know of. I have:

• Nurses's 5-Minute Clinical Consult: Diseases from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. This is a new book just published that contains over 400 medical diseases included psych and OB. Also includes nursing interventions. Rather than a list of symptoms, it gives you the assessment information you are going to find for each condition. However, if you know the nursing process, then you know that the abnormal things you find during your assessment of the patient ARE your signs and symptoms that you need to determine your nursing diagnoses. $34.95
• Pathophysiology: A 2-in-1 Reference for Nurses also from Lippincott Williams and Wilkins. Gives good symptoms as well as explanations of the pathophysiology and nursing interventions, but in a paragraph form, not in lists. I would highly recommend this book, but it does have one flaw: no psych or OB conditions are listed in it. There is a companion book in the series called Signs & Symptoms: A 2-in-1 Reference for Nurses in which you can look up a symptom and be given a list of medical disease that have that symptom. However, I don't think that this Signs & Symptoms book is what your instructor wants you to use. I have both of these books and I seldom use the Signs & Symptoms book.

You might want to go to Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins website and look at what they have. They publish a number of books of pathophysiology. I bought one a year ago which I didn't like. It only contains the most common medical diseases, it has beautiful pictures, it's big and bulky and it's already coming apart (poor binding). It does, however, give nice lists of the signs and symptoms.

A website where you can get lists of signs and symptoms of various diseases is on Family Practice Notebook (http://www.fpnotebook.com/index.htm) if you have access to the Internet while you are in clinicals. Put the name of the disease you are looking for in the search box which appears on each page of the program. If that doesn't find it for you, try searching by a common symptom that you know the patient has, or from the home page you can link into the medical specialties and see what comes up. This site is thumbnail lists of signs & symptoms, diagnostic tests and treatment for diseases. There are lots of blue highlighted links to other pages within the site. It is mainly designed for doctors, but as a nursing student you need to know this same information.