Heart Sounds Made Easy with CD-ROM: (with CD-ROM) 2nd Edition

This is a great book and MINI-cd combination for brushing up on heart assessments. As Dr. Sanders ( Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis ) points out, recent primary care practitioners have tended to rely more heavily on diagnostic tests, such as the echocardiogram, than on their own assessment skills. The problem with that approach is it results in misdiagnoses. One example she gives is a that of a middle age women who is diagnosed with asthma, when in fact the rheumatic fever she had as a child resulted in progressive valve deterioration. If the primary care practitioner had appreciated the murmur, her illness would have been correctly diagnosed months before the patient was hospitalized.Dr. Sanders reports that studies show that practitioners who listen over and over to heart sounds learn to differentiate normal from pathologic sounds, and make the correct diagnosis. This product allows you to do just that. Better, it allows you to fiddle with the volumes of different parts of the heart rhythm when listening to the sounds, helping you to appreciate their subtleties and timing. The book also includes information about the 12-lead EKG, echocardiogram, and chest x-ray results which go along with the auscultation findings for different pathologies.My only caveat, and the reason this gets 4 stars rather than 5, is the MINI as opposed to the full-sized CD. I advise you to make sure you have, or a friend has, a computer with a "front-tray" drive before you get it. I used such a computer to burn a full-sized copy so I could execute the software and listen to the heart sounds on a mac with only a slot DVD/CD drive.One last thing-- the files on this are MP3 files, so you cannot just slide a copy of the CD into your car's CD player, unless it plays MP3s. I'm not sure how helpful that would be without the included software, anyway, since you need other information to identify the murmurs.

Ok, I haven't read it or listened to the CD yet. But since this one came with a "CD" I thought it would be perfect to pop into the car CD player and listen while commuting. WRONG. This comes with a mini CD that is not compatible with front load CD players. I would not have bought this if I had known because now I will have to compete with family time to listen to this on home computer. My time is at a high premium so this will probably just collect dust.

The cd didn't work in my MacBook.

The cd did not offer anything. You had to contact the company to download it because it was an old version. Did not include heart sounds such as Summation Gallop, clicks, or other common pathology. Total waste of money.

This book was really helpful for heart sounds...especially the CD that came with it. The tutorials really help you understand it and not just memorize the sound! Must have book for heart sounds!

You will probably get the book without the CD. It's a tiny book, so without the heart sounds program, the book becomes extremely pricey and not worth it.

excellent info

Great Review and well presented!!

I just received this book today. The content of the book is, I'm sure, excellent. However, the main reason I bought it was the software on the CD-Rom. Unfortunately this doesn't work on my Mac. The Mac is apparently too new (bought it in July this year), it doesn't support the CD-Rom, although the CD-Rom was designed to work on Macs designed at the time the book came out (2008).It is probably fair to say it is Apple's fault. I have also found other softwares that came out as recently in 2011 which fail to work on my Mac because they are not supported. I can't believe it. Now I'll have to use this software on my battered Windows laptop, which with its poor quality speakers is pretty much useless for listening to the heart sounds in this CD-Rom.I can still access individual sound and picture files from the CD-Rom on my Mac, but without the interactive software, which is the selling point of this product, these files are hardly anymore useful than random clips on Youtube.Bitterly disappointed.

It was nice but not enough information