Which medical dictionary is best???

Nurses General Nursing

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Hello all! I have just began my first semester of nursing school this fall and our clinicals just started. I need to purchase a medical dictionary that I can look up medical diagnoses and find out the purpose of labs, ect. What would you recommend to be most useful throughout nursing school?

Tabors is great to start out as a beginner learning tool, then you will need to soon upgrade as you will soon "out grow" it. Remember, the resources are upgraded yearly. Palm pilots are a great tool to put all your medical resources in, easy to take with you, and you can download all sorts of info from the web.

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I am pre-nursing and love Taber's. I have it in hard copy, but I think that it would be nice to have it for the PDA. It was very helpful with prerequisite classes to the nursing program. I could see that nurses would outgrow it and need more specialized texts, but I think it is something to always have on the shelf.

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I have Taber's, and later got Mosby's...I like the Mosby's far better - it's much bigger, with lots of photos, and there's things in there that I had to reference for school that weren't in Taber's...I keep a software version of Taber's in my PDA for clinic, but for hitting the books there's nothing like Mosby's.

THis is exactly how I feel.

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Specializes in Jack of all trades, and still learning.

Mosbys - mines the 1998 5th edition, so maybe I should get a new one...oh good they now produce an Australian version! I love spending money on books.

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Specializes in Community Health, Med-Surg, Home Health.

Mosby is simply THE BEST. I also have Tabers, which, I didn't begin to appreciate until school was over. Now, they are also available to download into a PDA, which Taber's was downloaded into mine some time ago.

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Specializes in Community Health, Med-Surg, Home Health.

I also think that the Merck Manual is great. I purchased the home version of it and refer to it constantly to read about things in a no nonsense way. Merck also has a web site that is good to look up things in a pinch.

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Specializes in Community Health, Med-Surg, Home Health.

There are MANY resources that are great to download into the PDA. I have the Davis Drug Guide and Tabers. I didn't know that Mosby can be downloaded until later, but I have no need to have two medical dictionaries on mine. I plan to download Diagnostic Procedures and Diabetic information in there this weekend. I carry my PDA in a fanny pack so that it NEVER leaves my side. It is too valuable a tool to leave around. Most of the interns and residents are first in line to steal them, along with stethoscopes.

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Thank you so much for all your replies!! I think I'll check out both Mosby's and Taber's and decide between those.

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Specializes in Dialysis, Home Care, Hospice.

Taber's is also the one that I use.

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