Interested in emergency medicine? Then this is the book for you. This book summarises the literature in this field concisely and provides both an Australian and UK perspective on how these various issues may be dealt with. Apart from trauma, the book details a systematic approach to organ system problems and furthermore encompasses medicolegal issues, environmental problems, ED systems, and research. The book is clear and concise and the brief summaries of the issues in each chapter are pithy.

There is absolutely nothing in this book related to sports medicine in the purist sense. There is a section on orthopaedic emergencies (mainly fractures and dislocations) and a section on rheumatological emergencies (mainly acute monoarthritides and polyarthritides), but that is as close as it gets to sports medicine. This would seem somewhat of an oversight, as I am assured that one or two athletes do attend emergency departments with acute problems. It is interesting to appreciate the different insight that an ED physician brings to clinical sports injuries. In the section on acute knee injuries for example, much is made of the use of imaging modalities, especially magnetic resonance scanning, rather than the details of clinical diagnosis. There is impressively little on first aid of such injuries such as “RICE” treatment but rather the assumption that most injuries require operative intervention. This different approach highlights the role that sports physicians could play in this environment by triaging the huge number of sporting injuries that can be managed conservatively.

But I am being picky. This book is written for ED specialists who spend their lives contemplating such emergencies. As such it is a triumph!

It is not a book for sports physicians.