I am a fellowship-trained interventional pain management physician, and I purchased this book with high hopes after reading the first review and the editorial summary. I received it, and promptly returned it. It really falls short in my opinion. The positioning pictures uses three pictures that really add very little to the basic knowledge of positioning the fluoroscopy unit. It does not make the effort to explain nuances of using the C-arm to open up the facet joints, etc. The pictures of the blocks performed show only the final placement of the needle, without any guidance on how to get it there, which is what is really needed in a text such as this. Furthermore, the image quality is remarkably poor in some of the shots. I think anyone interested in a guide on using fluoroscopy for pain management is better off waiting for Prithvi Raj's book, which is due in fall, 2002. His book on Pain Management is excellent and I expect nothing less with his upcoming book, which I have pre-ordered.

We have been using this amazing, comprehensive manual in our pain practice for 4 months. The time that is saved by ustilizing the author's concise explainations of correct patient and flouroscope positioning has cut out time per procedure down and increased the quality of images 3-fold.

Included, are flouro images of each simple and complex procedure performed.

I highly recommend this manual to any radiologic technologist, interventional pain management physician, orthopedist, neurosurgeon and physical medicine and rehabilitation physician.

Radiology departments everywhere should have at least one copy for those technologists who are asked to participate in any injection or implantation procedure.

The cost of this easy-to-use book is paid for in a few days of using it!

First, let me explian why I give this text 3 stars. The book is written particularly for individuals within some aspect of the Political Science discipline. Therefore, its appeal, I believe, is not toward the mass public. Although not a text that mass quanities of the American public would flock to read that does not signify a bad book. Erikson, Wright, and McIver present a very intriguing thesis. In sum, they demonstrate a strong connection between public opinion and policy in American states. Simply, liberal states produces liberal policies and conservative states produce conservative policies. Their methods of obtaining data to conclude this fact is extremely interesting. For that reason I recommend the text to anyone intrigued by the study of public opinion or State Government. For example, they examine state-level opinions surveys toward issues like welfare, Medicaid and education and then examine the ideology of state polices on those specific issues. In return, the data demonstrated the stated thesis, for example, a strong conseravtive public attitude toward educational spending produced a conservative public policy. I thank the authors for the exhausative amount of information and evidence. This book is a good example of the way in which political research is to be completed.