Borrowing autonomic textbooks from the library

[Heiferly]

For those who have gotten heavily into dysautonomia research and have been shocked/bummed out by the prices of the autonomic textbooks most relevant to our disorders, I have what may be good news!

I managed to procure copies of 2 textbooks so far using my local public library's interlibrary loan system (at no cost to me).  Here are some tips that may help others:  have the full information on the text available to submit for the interlibrary loan [ILL] request, including the author, title, publisher, year of publication (note if there is more than one edition and if it makes a difference to you whether you end up with an older edition), and the ISBN number.  I then looked the books up on worldcat (http://www.worldcat.org/) to find the closest locations of libraries to me that had the book I was seeking in their holdings, and included the link to the respective search results page for each book I was requesting in my ILL request.  Hopefully, that makes it easier for the librarians to identify which of the libraries with which they have ILL is the one they need to call to set up borrowing the book for you.  

You can preview select pages of different textbooks with the look inside feature on amazon.com if you want to get an idea of what a given book is like ahead of time.  Happy researching!!

[Heiferly]

As far as what to *start* with, The Fainting Phenomenon by Dr. Blair Grubb is written to be accessible to laypersons.  None of the actual medical textbooks are easy reads without some foundation in biology/physiology/anatomy/etc. ... keeping a basic "intro to neuroscience" textbook handy for reference (can be gotten cheaply at used book stores) is helpful.

Many of the titles that I've found useful to date can be found among the listed writings by the authors on this page:

http://www.medhelp.org/health_pages/Neurological-Disorders/Dysautonomia--POTS-Diagnostic-Criteria/show/1011?cid=196

You can find a great deal of the best writings that have been done specifically on OI disorders of dysautonomia (such as POTS) by looking for these authors/doctors:  Phillip Low, Christopher Matthias, Blair Grubb, David Streeten, Julian Stewart, David Robertson, and Fetnat Fouad-Tarazi.  There are TONS of autonomic texts on amazon.com so I suggest looking on there to get ideas because many have the preview feature that allows you to view the table of contents and read a few preview pages to get an idea of what the text is like so you know if it's what you want.  Then you can narrow down a short list of what you'd like to pursue from the library.  Keywords like "syncope" and "autonomic" are probably most useful, rather than looking for general neuroscience books which will mostly talk about the properly functioning ANS, rather than delving into the specifics of clinical autonomic practice (i.e. autonomic dysfunction).  Happy reading!!

[acesew]

What are some good books to start with?  There seems to be a lot of neurology books out there, but hard to tell which ones will cover dyso.
Thanks