Editors: Alan Roger Santos-Silva, Márcio Ajudarte Lopes, João Figueira Scarini et al.; 2023; Springer Cham; £63.99 (eBook); pp. 216; ISBN: 978-3-031-14945-0

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Oral medicine is an important clinical area, and identifying the varied clinical presentations of patients with a range of oral soft tissue conditions can often be challenging. This is a new textbook on oral medicine, which is clinically oriented and mostly focused on the diagnostic aspect of oral medicine. This textbook is written by authors mainly based in Brazil. The target audience of this text seems to be that of qualified dental surgeons, most likely working in a secondary care setting. The textbook lends itself to use by dental surgeons aiming to use this to learn around certain clinical presentations encountered in clinical practice and guide next steps in clinical management. Given the scope and level of the book, I would not recommend it for primary use for undergraduate dental students except to use on occasion as a reference.

The title of the textbook, Critical decision-making in oral medicine, grabbed my attention as critical decision-making is an important facet of oral medicine clinical practice. However, I feel that the text does not fully engage with this concept as much as it might, which is a pity as this would have been an opportunity to approach the subject area in a novel and very interesting way.

The overall text is well written, with excellent clinical images, and the content is accurate albeit there are some obvious differences in the authors' management approach in some areas compared to routine UK clinical practice. The authors make extensive use of bullet points which is helpful as a quick reference guide; however, a more narrative approach would have created opportunities to engage more fully with the declared title.

Part 1, titled ‘Clinical protocols for oral diagnosis', includes chapters on history taking and physical examination, standardisation in oral photography, fine needle aspiration cytology and exfoliative cytology, biopsy of the oral mucosa, histopathological assessment, and protocols for breaking bad news. Part 2 titled, ‘Reactive lesions and non-neoplastic processes', includes chapters on traumatic oral ulcers, recurrent aphthous stomatitis, desquamative gingivitis, non-neoplastic proliferative processes, and giant cell granuloma. Parts 3-6 include ‘Common oral infections, salivary gland, vascular, mucocutaneous diseases' whilst Part 7 is titled ‘Oral potentially malignant disorders and cancer'. Part 8 deals with oral management strategies for patients with special needs (relates predominantly to special care dentistry within the UK) and somehow management of patients with burning mouth syndrome is included within this section which is the only reference to facial pain in the textbook.

The textbook includes distinct chapters outlining clinical presentations and mostly focusing on differential diagnoses and investigation of these clinical presentations, with very brief comments about treatment. For example, there are some chapters which deal with patients presenting with a traumatic oral ulcer or patients presenting with dry mouth, which are helpful and align with the declared purpose of the textbook. Unfortunately, this approach is interrupted with a number of condition-based chapters such as ‘oral herpes' or ‘pyogenic granuloma' rather than retaining the same consistent format such as ‘localised oral mucosal or gingival lump'.

Overall, this is a textbook which could be a helpful reference, in terms of a differential diagnosis for a busy clinician with limited time to interact with a textbook and explore potential differential diagnosis and briefly update their learning. However, I would not suggest this as a main oral medicine textbook, although within a library this could be a helpful addition to complement other oral medicine textbooks.