Are these really the questions that American customers come in and ask of their librarians? People do ask odd things of us, but with so much dietetic information available in the general media I am surprised to learn that there are readers who wander up to their local library's reference enquiry desk saying “I want to lose a pound a week. How should I do this?” (I think my answer would be “come to the library every day – walking or running all the way, and don't eat anything at all while you are in there” but I suppose that the one‐page response here suggesting skimmed milk, diet soda instead of regular soft drinks, reducing portion sizes, checking food labels, etc. is just as good). Clinicians are notoriously bad at communicating with their patients, so people do need access to other sources of health information. My own introduction to this fact came some 40 years ago in my very first library job when a woman came in saying “The doctor says my little boy has got autism. What is it, and are there any books about curing it at home?” You try inflicting that one on a newly appointed library assistant. This book does actually raise the same question, so it is obviously still being asked, and the answer still is that there is no known cure. The book also mentions the question of the connection of autism with MMR injections. The answer to this could have been made firmer, or has possibly been overtaken by events – both the Center for Disease Control & Prevention and the British Medical Association have in the past year come firmly to the conclusion that there is no connection whatsoever, and that the papers which suggested that there was were grossly misleading. The web has, of course, compounded this sort of problem. There is more inaccurate and misleading information available to the gullible public than ever before – peddling snake oil from the back of a wagon can only reach a few hundred people, but a well‐designed web site can deceive millions.
With the support of the Medical Library Association, the authors of this book sent an online survey link out to American library discussion lists. A total of 270 librarians responded, listing the questions they had most frequently been asked. The results are tabulated here, with brief factual answers supplemented with links to web sites that (I presume) have been checked for accuracy by the authors, and suggestions for further reading. I am surprised by the small number of mental health related questions – even before I became a psychiatric librarian, these seemed to me to weigh more heavily with the general public than the evidence here suggests – Alzheimer's is covered briefly under “Senior Health,” and Obsessive‐Compulsive Disorder and Porphyria under the dubious heading of “Odds and Ends,” but surprisingly little else. There are various useful appendices, most notably an expert glossary – as a large proportion of health‐related books and web sites are American in origin it is quite useful for the rest of us to pick up on American terminology. An “intern” seems to be what in England is called a “registrar” (both fairly meaningless terms really) but an “internist” is a specialist in internal medicine (I presume this is the opposite of a dermatologist?).
There are, of course, an enormous number of published guides answering general medical questions. From the dawn of human history, practically the earliest written records are either interpretations of dreams or guides to popular medicine – frequently, in fact, both together. (Nothing on dreaming in this book though, and again, surprisingly little on sleep disorders.) All general libraries should carry a stock of them. I cannot see anything here that will do the sick any harm, and much that may do some good. The book is by no means a complete guide, and appears to me to be a bit unbalanced, though I may merely be out of touch. The price seems slightly stiff for a tool which is inevitably going to date rapidly, but nevertheless this is a useful addition to the general librarian's armoury.
