Bhave's Textbook of Adolescent Medicine

We were fortunate to be the pioneers in bringing out the first textbook of adolescent medicine in India in 2006 and now again working together for this second edition. We are honored to have a two forewords for this book from very illustrious personalities: from one of our own team of editors from the first edition, Dr MKC Nair who is one of the pioneers of adolescent health in the country and is now the Vice Chancellor of the Kerala University of Health Sciences and Dr Bruce Dick who is the President of the IAAH–International Association of Adolescent Health and is an internationally acclaimed adolescent health expert who had worked in WHO, Geneva in the child and adolescent section for many years. We are privileged to have an appreciation from Padmabhushan Awardee Dr RD Lele known as the “Father of Nuclear Medicine in India”, and author of many outstanding books in medicine and non-medical subjects. He is now 87 years old and had also given us an appreciation for the 1st edition. We are fortunate to again have as our Guest Editor, Dr Donald E Greydanus, who is an internationally renowned, American Adolescent specialist, who has authored innumerable books on various aspects of adolescence. The last edition was a voluminous book with more than 1200 pages. It was the need of the hour as adolescent medicine was in its infancy in our country and we wanted to cover as many topics as possible which would be of value to all stakeholders in adolescent health. So many topics were included in addition to clinical medicine relevant to adolescent health — school mental health, life-skill training, parenting, positive discipline, stress and anger management, gender issues, dating violence, risk-taking behaviors, sports medicine, disaster management, public health issues, field experience of NGOs and many more. This edition is now focusing only on clinical adolescent medicine and the aim is to cater to physicians of all specialties who see adolescents in their clinical practice. We have tried to make it a desktop reference which highlights adolescencespecific issues in clinical medicine which may not be available in other pediatric or adult medicine textbooks. Our aim is not to provide detailed disease descriptions; but highlight those diseases and health issues that present in adolescent age group for the first time or get aggravated in adolescent age group. We have also spent a lot of pages on chapters which are very important to practicing clinicians—setting up an ideal adolescent-friendly health clinic, understanding neurodevelopment to learn how to deal with the adolescent age group, specialized history taking, approach to adolescent patients and handling parents. Some important new topics like WHO preconception care, screening and prevention of non-communicable diseases and palliative care are added. Some annexures for practical use have IAP growth charts which are useful standards for height, weight and BMI; drug dosages, and various questionnaires and proformas which should be of help for practicing adolescent specialists. We also have added information on the prestigious RKSK program of Government of India and a resource list of important documents of WHO on adolescent health.