Positive review from YBP Library Services - E-Streams

Directed towards the thyroid patient or a family member desiring to learn more about the disease, A Simple Guide to Thyroid Disorders accomplishes that mission handily. From the comfortable size, large easy-to-read type and straightforward layout of the book to the extensive glossary, thorough index and sizeable list of additional resources, this book achieves the goal of informing the reader in an approachable manner. Personal patient "cases" are interspersed throughout the text along with short sidebars from medical personnel and patients. These serve to highlight some of the points within each chapter.

The opening chapter provides a basic overview of the thyroid gland, its function, and the vocabulary a patient can expect to hear while experiencing diagnosis and treatment for thyroid disorders. The remaining eight chapters each highlight a fundamental aspect of thyroid disease including diagnosis, underactive thyroid and treatment, overactive thyroid and treatment, surgery, thyroid cancer, and pregnancy related thyroid problems.

Those illustrations included in the book are simple and understandable line drawings, tables and charts. However, as a book patently directed at the consumer health arena, this book might have benefited from a few more pictures. The patient might also appreciate finding the illustration of the thyroid gland and its physical location in the body nearer to the description of the thyroid instead of a page or two later in the description of the hormones that the thyroid produces. This book would be recommended for patient care or consumer health collections as well as public libraries.

E- STREAMS, Vol. 7, No. 4

Reviewer: Sandra D. Dunbar, Library Technical Assistant, University of Illinois at Chicago Library of the Health Sciences,  Peoria