GET AHEAD! SURGERY: 250 SBAS FOR FINALS

Abstract

This textbook, published in 2009, is aimed at Final Year students of Medicine sitting their Surgical examination paper. It contains 250 Single Best Answer questions. The layout is that the book contains five practice papers, each containing 50 questions. The student is advised to allow between 1–1½ hours per paper. The book gives the correct answer and, usefully, a brief commentary to that answer. There is a satisfactory, albeit short, examination-orientated discussion of the answer. As with any textbook of this nature, there can be a few, albeit relatively minor, critiques such as the absence of the mention of laparoscopic surgery when discussing appendicectomy and perforated duodenal ulcer. The description of thyroid cancer would warrant a line or two on the usefulness of fine needle biopsy in most thyroid cancers apart from follicular tumour (in which it cannot distinguish benign from malignant). On Page 45, Question 1, on gallbladder incisions, it would be more appropriate to include a discussion of laparoscopic gallbladder incisions which are, by far, the most common method of surgical access for today's gallbladder procedures. In the index, under Thyroid Cancers, Pages 33 and 123 are given, but on Page 123 there is no mention of thyroid cancer. Leaving aside these relatively minor points, this book is a useful revision text for students undertaking Final Medicine examinations in Surgery. The authors are relatively young, one being a Registrar in Emergency Medicine, the other being an academic Fellow in Vascular Surgery, and have a sense of the current standards of final surgical examinations in Medicine. The questions are in a modern format and the commentaries are, by and large, timely and up-to-date. The book can be recommended as a revision text in those anxious few months prior to medical finals.