The Little Black Book, now updated for 2004, is intended as a very portable starter manual with heavily referenced, concise, practical, clinically relevant information presented in a standardized format. It contains usual clinical approaches, personal pearls, as well as and most importantly, literature-debated issues. Over 6000 very specific references for virtually every aspect of clinical primary care make the book unique among similar medical manuals. Disease processes about which there is little current controversy, or new information are treated briefly; the book assumes the user already knows the basics.

Clinical information in the book is organized generally by medical specialty and can be accessed either by perusal down through the hierarchies of the table of contents, or by finding the disease or clinical word of interest in the Main Index or the Prevention or Emergency Indexes. Main Index entries will generally take the reader to the relevant disease page or, if a medication, to a related medications list. Disease page information is presented under the standard nine categories: Cause, Pathophysiology, Epidemiology, Symptoms, Signs, Course, Complications, Lab, X-ray, and Rx.