Pharmacology, 3rd Edition (Lippincott's Illustrated Reviews Series)

I used this book many years ago to get through pharmacology. I found that reading it before reading the class notes and doing questions was best. It was a lot better than the overly detailed notes from class or the Lange book, that was filled with useless details.The main points (mechanism of action, side effects, indication, etc.) are clearly stated with illustrations to clarify and help with remembering. It is concise and geared to what you need to know for Boards and also in practice, whether you are a student or resident on the wards, or later on in practice. Now that I teach medical students, I am buying an updated version, since it still offers the best way to explain pharmacology in medical practice.

I really liked this book for my pharmacology course as a medical student. Pleasing charts and diagrams. Concise and well written. I would highly recommend.

LIR Pharm seems to be one of those books that everyone uses in medical school. It's really not short or quick to read at over 500 pages. But the fact that the authors keep all of the chapters at about 10-15 pages makes each one a fairly easy and digestible read. As others have already said, the greatest strength of the book by far is the excellent illustrations. I think the book is worth buying for the illustrations alone, especially since they are in color in the third edition. Also, I really loved the little cartoon people that they use for the figures that show the side effects. However, I don't think this book is detailed enough for a medical school pharmacology class. (Well, at least it wasn't for mine!) What I found to be really helpful was to read the chapter in this book first, and then read the corresponding chapter in Katzung or Goodman and Gilman.One thing about this book annoyed me a lot, and that was the huge number of typos that are present throughout. You would think that surely by the third edition, the editors could find them all and fix them. Most of the time, the typos were merely annoying, but there was one typo on page 237 that was outright wrong. It says that danaparoid is a mixture of the sulfates of heparin, dermatan, and chondroitin, but it should be HEPARAN, dermatan, and chondroitin. Danaparoid doesn't contain heparin!

I used this as my primary source for studying pharm, and it's absolutely indispensable for studying for the boards. Although I do wish they had those chapter summaries that were in the biochemistry book.

Must have if you are in the process of reviewing content and preparing for pharmacy exam. Great content and questions.

This book is clear, concise, and has great illustrations and charts that supplement and explain the material very well. It is a good text for an introductory level. However, for a graduate level class, I am always seeking other texts for more information. It provides cursory-level information, but few details. Also, I appreciate the way the categories are organized for some topics, but other topics the book will just have a brief paragraph. However, I do recommend this book to help you generally understand the pharmacology of a large variety of categories, and I cannot stress the excellence of the charts and figures, but if you want to focus on a topic, plan on looking in another text.

excellent book for review

Lippincott Pharm is a fabulous book for medical students. It has the basics clearly outlined and nice tables to help you remember them. The text is brief and clear. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that it is a bit dry and can be hard to get through.