Description
Compact on purpose
Arrhythmia references tend toward the encyclopaedic, which makes them excellent for study and useless at three in the morning. This one is 216 pages, organised so a clinician holding a monitor strip can reach an action in under a minute.
Organised by what you can see
Not by diagnosis, which you may not have yet, but by the triage available at the bedside: regular or irregular, narrow or broad, stable or unstable. Acute management follows the same division. The diagnosis often arrives afterwards, and the book is honest that this is the normal order rather than a shortcut.
The referral threshold
Stated explicitly throughout, which matters disproportionately for members practising without electrophysiology on site. Knowing which rhythm can be managed locally, which needs a cardiology opinion this week, and which needs a transfer tonight is a different competence from knowing what the rhythm is.
Longer-term decisions
Rate against rhythm control and where recent evidence has shifted the balance. Anticoagulation, weighing CHA₂DS₂-VASc against HAS-BLED, including the patients where both scores are high and the decision is genuinely uncomfortable. Ablation candidacy. Device selection. Inherited syndromes.
Suits
General physicians, emergency and acute physicians, intensivists, cardiologists in general practice, and coronary care nursing staff.
PDF, lifetime access, from CardiologyBooks.com.
From the bedside trace to the clinic decision
Arrhythmia management is followed across the whole path rather than at a single point: the rhythm strip at the bedside, the immediate decision to rate control, rhythm control or cardiovert, then the anticoagulation decision, then the clinic conversation about ablation, device therapy and long-term risk.
The decisions that are actually difficult
Space is given to the genuinely hard calls — atrial fibrillation with a competing bleeding risk, the patient with recurrent syncope and a non-diagnostic monitor, ventricular ectopy that may or may not be causing a cardiomyopathy, the device patient with inappropriate shocks. Scoring systems are used as they should be, as a structure for a conversation rather than a substitute for one, and the text is explicit about where they perform badly.
