220-Dictionary of Pharmaceutical Medicine, 2nd Edition-Gerhard Nahler Annette Mollet-3211898352-S

Preface of the 1st editionPharmaceutical medicine nowadays is a multidisciplinary area comprisingaspects of toxicology, pharmacology, statistics, drug-regulatoryand legal affairs, medicine and a number of other disciplines.Therefore it is necessary to acquire additional knowledge to whateverone has studied or done at the begin ning. Although post-graduateformation is offered by an in creasing number of institutions, trainingin the field of pharma ceutical medicine is largely “on the job” anddone mainly by the pharmaceutical industry or contract researchorganisations. Many years of experience with new colleagues showedme how useful some sort of booklet might be, that would give thema better understanding of some of the less familiar technical termsand their context. In this dictionary, containing at present morethan 800 keywords, the attention of the user is drawn to such relationshipsby cross-references printed in small capitals.In addition, it is always a difficult decision as to whether to includecitations or not and there was a great temptation to makereferences throughout the text to important publications especiallythose of health authorities. However, this would certainly have beenbeyond the scope of a brief dictionary intended for daily use and Ifind it absolutely necessary that the user familiarises him- or herselfwith original, complete texts and specific, original literature for furtherinformation and not only with a compilation of citations. As aconsequence, some important documents are listed in the back matterof this book. It was after all these deliberations that the idea ofproducing this particular type of short dictionary in its present formwas born.As is the problem with almost all dictionaries, information giventherein must be short. Furthermore, the discipline of pharmaceuticalmedicine is in permanent evolution and grow ing. This makes itdifficult to keep such a dictionary “complete” and up-to-date. In addition,this dynamic process also leads to differences in an individual’sunderstanding and utilisation of one and the same term. It will certainlyoccur that one person, also among readers, might interpretor define some terms differently from another. I beg therefore theuser’s indulgence of these aspects and invite their comments.A further important aspect is the utilisation of abbreviations.Technical jargon usually tends to create its own abbreviations, andthis is also true for the field of pharmaceutical medicine. A separateregister of more than 800 frequently used abbrevia tions is thereforeincluded.