hi everyone this is abc's of anesthesia and let's get right to it so what we're going to talk about
today is the three textbooks i found most useful when starting out and with anesthesia training
now as always i've got no sponsors no affiliations no incentives so all of this is just completely my
opinion i receive no kickbacks for this so with that in mind let's get started
so now there's obviously so many different textbooks out there that you could probably
learn from and so many other resources but what i found about anesthesia is that first of all
from even medical school days you just didn't do that much anesthesia training
i mean a lot of time we're doing ward work in general medicine general surgery orthopedics
cardiology and we just didn't get that much time so when you're first on your anaesthetic rotation
it's probably the first time you've actually done much anaesthetics and you don't really get too
much time so i know in our hospital maybe you'll get a week of anesthesia and if you want to do an
elective you might get four weeks and that's only some people that get that so really it's going
to be very unfamiliar to you and you won't have the same amount of time that the medical school
usually gives to other specialties so first of all there's lots of information to learn you need to
learn it rapidly it's really niche information so very specialized lots of niche terms lots of you
know acronyms lots of skills and knowledge that you probably haven't really thought about before
and so you need to really have the most succinct textbooks that are very focused on what you need
to know for anesthesia now just to give you a bit of a start so in this series we're going
to go through you know the best apps the best journals the best websites and the best textbooks
but basically i think of anesthesia as these range of skills so firstly you've got procedural
skills um and then pharmacological skills and then physiology as it relates to clinical
anesthesia with you know particular surgery and the patient's pathology and so those are the three
broad areas and you can divide them up into lots of different different things now first of all
procedural skills you know the best thing to do is just get in there and with supervision learn
how to do your iv cannulation vascular access arterial lines and airway management intubations
lma bag mask ventilation and that's stuff that you know it's really hard to learn from a textbook or
any kind of written resource you can check out my videos on intubation i'll probably track link up
there as well as i've got a whole playlist on iv cannulation again one of the most important
tasks that you'll ever do is iv cannulation so um in this playlist over here i've pretty much got
all the information that you know i've gathered over over the years so hopefully that helps you
now on to pharmacology and physiology now there's a lot of pharmacology textbooks out
there and again the aim is that you want something that's brief enough
that gives you a really good summary but also goes into just the amount of detail that you need
and so this is the first resource that i'm going to talk about which is pharmacology
for anesthesia and intensive care this is an older rendition uh it's by peck helen williams
and i just think so first of all this is just a fantastic book that most australian nieces have
probably heard of because they all used it to pass their primary exam the way this book goes through
everything is just incredibly succinct so you know as you can see this this book is only let's say
i'm about 350 pages long um it's got all the major sections and this is obviously a third
edition by pacquiao and williams but there's now newer editions and the range of authors have
changed but it goes through everything from basic principles to core drugs and anesthetic practice
so those first two chapters are absolutely vital because you know you'll go through your
general anaesthetic agents analgesics local anaesthetic muscle relaxants and anti-cline
esters and then it goes into cardiovascular drugs which again you use so frequently
now the important thing about this is that it doesn't it doesn't go into a way that most other
pharmacology textbooks goes into there's a you know so many good pharmacology textbooks out there
i think in med school we use rangdale and rita which is an amazing textbook and you can also go
into some really really detailed kind of bibles of pharmacology and anesthesia one of them is stolten
again very very good books but they don't go through it as succinctly as this one does
um so this one this this one will go through the way an anaesthetist thinks about most these
medications and then highlight and isolate these very particular niche points about each of them
now you can definitely learn about these pharmacological principles in a really brief way
in some of my lectures but i've also just launched a new online course called medical students guide
to anesthesia where i go through some of these really basic concepts and i'll put a link in in
the notes below as well so some of the high points of this textbook well first of all it goes through
some of the things that are very niche to anesthesia for example if you ever
wondered how to run a profile infusion this book goes through the pharmacy kinetics and
the mathematical modeling for that the way we look at this three compartment mammalian model
and the way you know this medications profile is able to redistribute and it's mathematically
modeled to do so so this book goes through that it also goes through a lot of other basic concepts
but in an anesthetically relevant way so some of the highlights from each of each of the sections
i mean if you think of volatile agents you really want to know what anesthesias think is important
for their patient care which is you know how do you know if something's going to be fast onset and
offset what are the particular side effects what's the profile of you know cardiovascular depression
vasodilation vena dilation for each of these agents and again this will go through that
in a really good concise way um also for muscle relaxants it will not only go through each of the
agents but also go through all the pharmacokinetic principles and pharmacodynamics as well as some
of those interesting things like sucks apnea and milk and hypothermia and give you some of
the pharmacology about that as well you know with local anesthetics you might want to know about the
toxic doses the cc the cns ratio again things that i remember never actually reading in my normal
pharmacology textbooks but in this one absolutely vital so that's just a bit of a bit of a brief um
summary of this book and a few of the high points but again pharmacology for anesthesia intensive
care fantastic book and you know probably one of the first books i ever bought for anesthesia
really good to go through so the next topic is far broader and this is how do you really learn
the immense amount of physiology and clinical anesthesia that you need to know for anesthesia so
obviously it's such a big topic and again the same principle applies you don't need something with
too much detail for example you know people consider miller's anesthesiology probably the
bible of anesthesia and some fantastic reference because there's so much amazing knowledge i think
a lot of us for our final specialty exams will go through the thoracics chapter we'll go through the
airway management chapter again written by some amazing authors um but the one book that i found
really really useful aside from some journal articles which i'll talk about later was clinical
anesthesiology by morgan mchale and murray so this is obviously an older textbook now but
there's you know newer editions and again i highly recommend this one the reason i recommend this one
is first it goes into just the right amount of detail without going to unnecessary stuff
at a junior level so you know for your specialty exam you'll definitely have to you know know some
of the detail of the papers and the research and and all the other clinical aspects but this goes
through a lot of that in just enough bite-sized parcels of information so just a quick summary
it goes through anesthetic equipment in a nice brief way and it tells you about the different
breathing systems and monitoring but it also goes through regional anesthesia and pain management
again in a summarized fashion and the best thing about it it goes through a lot of the concepts of
cardiovascular and respiratory physiology which you absolutely need and then also anesthesia as
it pertains to particular kinds of surgery for example you might be having a thoracic
list the next day if you read a bit of that chapter on anesthesia for the thoracic surgery
at least it would mean that you would know a lot of those fundamental principles and that'd be
that'd be fantastic likewise maybe you've got a neurosurgery case and instead of reading uh
you know the bible anesthesiology the bible of neuroanesthesia you can just read this little
chapter and it will go through a lot of that in some you know in some decent detail so that's
morgan mchale clinical anesthesiology again if there's one textbook resource
this is this is a really good reference type thing where you can just flick to the page
before your list before your case and do a bit of a read up on that
now the final book i want to go through is this one here which is um anesthesia and intensive care
a to z so this is by yentis hirsch and smith and it's an encyclopedia of the principle and practice
of anesthesia now this is the third edition again there's probably new additions out there but i
found this especially for my part one and part two exams an incredibly amazing resource because
it's not just like a a dictionary and it's not quite like an encyclopedia it's not as detailed
as an encyclopedia but it's not as brief as a dictionary so while morgan and mikhail goes into
a bit more detail this one is a great reference so anytime i wasn't sure what a particular term
meant i'll just flick to it and then you know get some information if i was just a flick to any page
maybe you had a patient who had a cardiac arrest and you wanted to learn about defibrillation
it's got this nice section probably half a page just on defibrillation
and the mechanics of that or maybe you want to know about the different larynx scope blades
so again it just gives a really nice summary here which is fantastic because you really just
need a bite-sized bit of information to go into this kind of stuff and on the next page again
you know it's really hard to be able to find really good resources for airway anatomy but again
this book just has a really great summary of each of these principles look so that's probably all i
wanted to go into um if you have any questions or comments please leave it below but also if
you have any other suggestions for textbook that you found more useful or just really useful for
your anaesthetic training please leave it in the comments below and i'd love to hear about i'd love
to find out where the best points of knowledge are where i can you know refer people to where
i can learn from myself so please leave it in the comments um if you found any other resources or
textbooks that were really fantastic so as always if you enjoyed this video please share with anyone
who might be interested in this topic for the next series of videos we're going to go through
the best apps the best websites and the best journal articles just as a bit of a how to get
good resource for anesthesia and we'll see you next time thanks very much for watching
you