Your brain and nerves (The Scribner library)

By J. Lawrence Pool

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684158949
• ISBN13: 9780684158945
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Scribner
• Length: 211 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Everything You Should Know

The title of this review comes from the cover of Pool's book. J Lawrence Pool was a famous neurosurgeon when he wrote this book back in the 1970's. Everything you as a patient should know is not the same thing as what Pool needed to know. This book was written from the point of view of what a physician should tell a patient who has some sort of ailment of the brain or nerves. Some of the information is no longer the generally accepted. For example, there are not 24 spinal vertebrae. Most of the time technical terms are avoided in order to ease explanation. But though the cranial nerves are not all named and explained, the ending of the spinal nerves is properly labeled the cauda equina (horse's tail). That's what makes the usefulness of this book questionable. Pool describes certain procedures as being painful. In the last thirty years some of these procedures have become less painful. Yet at the same time pain in the left arm is still a valid sympton for diagnosing CVA's. Something that might be interesting is reading what Pool considered topline medicine in the 1970's. For example as Pool wrote this book, brain surgery for a leaking aneurysm "can now be successfully treated" 95% of the time, whereas 15 years before Pool wrote his book such operations were only 50% successful. It never ceases to amaze me how much medicine has changed over the last ten years.