“My great appreciation for Skyscape products began the day I started packing my bags to come and do medicine overseas, and I realized in a new way that medical books are big! And heavy! And then I realized, that once I pay to get them here, they will only be relevant for a few years. Initially I began to despair, that is until I spent some time looking on the web for those few choice books that I refer to all the time….

I am a family doctor, who a few years ago decided on a quite different career path. I have worked now for the past several years in India, with a national charitable Indian health organization which is committed to caring for the poor in rural communities. At times, in smaller hospitals, I have been the surgeon, Obstetrician, pediatrician, internal medicine doctor, and orthopedist… in other words, a true family doc! At those times, in places where medical references were very limited, and the patient numbers were overwhelming, it has been so helpful to use the resources from Skyscape.

One scenario, was that on a particular day, I was seeing patients in a very busy outpatient clinic, and a man came with a new MI. He was quite young, and was a candidate for fibrinolytic therapy, which I had never done before. I pulled out my PDA, and opened Washington Manual from Skyscape to find a very clearly readable, well formatted body of information to get me started in the right direction. As a result, that patient walked out the hospital with minimal cardiac damage a few days later.

Now I am helping to establish the first family medicine residency program in the region and in that role, many of the junior doctors here (as they are called) look to me to know it all. Fortunately, it is immensely easier to appear so with such a wealth of information at ones fingertips.

One of my favorite programs is DrDrugs. I have tried other pharmaceutical programs on the PDA, which are so cumbersome and so difficult to read. I love the breadth of information that is so clearly presented in DrDrugs, while avoiding confusing navigation issues. It is effortless then to check drug interactions with other drugs using iFacts. Also, the linking system between all of the programs I use (particularly 5 Minute Pediatric Consult and 5 Min Medical Consult) is something that I have not found in any other program, which is something that makes these programs so easy to use. This is in contrast to the programs that I have used in the past, which make you dread having to actually get out your PDA to wade through confusing navigation systems to find information in resources much less reliable texts than are available through Skyscape.

Occasionally these days, I venture out to the rural villages to visit a friend. When people here find that you are a doctor, there is no end to the questions that you get, many things I have never seen before. Again, it is so handy to use the 5 Minute Consults to access information that is informative, which jogs my aging brain and provides a brief thorough synopsis.

Lastly, since my PDA has limited memory, it is difficult to use all of these programs from the machine itself, and most of them are used from the SD memory card. Other programs that I have tried to use in the past will not work when run from the memory card, but Skyscape products work fine. I encourage everyone to try these Skyscape products as they will never be disappointed."