Distilling complicated metabolic processes into digestible bites for medical students is a challenge at which most textbooks come up short. Miriam Rosenthal, PhD, professor of biochemistry in the Department of Physiological Sciences, decided to try a new approach.

Her new book, “Medical Biochemistry: Human Metabolism in Health and Disease,” which Dr. Rosenthal authored with an outside colleague, uses a narrative format to make the information more accessible to up-and-coming doctors. Medical students need to understand how those processes apply in a patient-care setting, not so much in a laboratory.

“We came to the conclusion that the existing texts didn’t work. They either were clinically irrelevant or they were encyclopedic,” says Dr. Rosenthal, who has taught at EVMS for more than 30 years.

She and co-author Robert H. Glew, PhD, professor of biomedical sciences at the University of New Mexico, worked together in recent years to co-edit a volume of clinical cases for medical biochemistry students. The approach for their new textbook came out of their love of teaching, where presenting the information in a way that’s relevant to the audience is essential to comprehension.

“The idea was to focus on metabolism for medical students” instead of primarily the chemical processes, says Dr. Rosenthal. “I’m hoping this is something a student would actually read. It’s similar to the way a good faculty member tries to lecture.”

The book uses clinical examples to demonstrate the importance of chemical pathways – the metabolic processes by which certain substances interact within an organism. Other texts tend to focus so much on the chemical aspects that it becomes hard for medical students to relate the information to what they might in a patient. For instance, Dr. Rosenthal says existing textbooks often overlook the simple fact that different organs are simultaneously performing different metabolic functions.