“Thinking as a specialist, acting as an ER doctor”

The emergency setting remains one of the most important parts of daily clinical practice for surgeons. Moreover, the triage surgeon may be faced with complicated patients, who are often suffering from a wide range of diseases and emerging conditions. To this end, the emergency surgeon must know how to interpret the symptoms/signs of each condition and initiate appropriate management before directing the patient to the most correct path and specialist.  Although several books have been published concerning a specific surgical field (e.g. emergencies in vascular, thoracic or general surgery), this book provides a concise and quick point of view describing the clinical and instrumental surgical pictures in all vascular, thoracic, and general surgical emergencies. This approach can be useful in gaining a practical understanding of different clinical scenarios in order to adopt a correct management and treatment. It offers a simple guide to discriminating between urgent and non-urgent conditions, avoiding unnecessary diagnostic and interventional workup. This book would like to be a practical help also for general practitioners and emergency physicians to learn more about primary management of life threatening pathologies.