This is an amazingly interesting and informative book for the kind of patient who wants to understand what the doctors have explained for the patient's specific case. In a particular situation recently, I was given large amounts of information about two maladies, which all made sense, but in a slightly disjointed and incomplete way.This 3rd edition Merck manual home health handbook not only agreed with everything I was told by two groups of specialists, but also joined it all together in a unified picture, and even extended my understanding beyond what they told me. For each malady, there were about 4 pages of clear explanation in this book. It helps me to understand why doctors ask certain kinds of unusual questions which initially seem irrelevant.So I would say that for the curious, or very curious, patient who wants to get more clarity and detail and background on what the doctors say, this book is really ideal. The problem with this, I guess, is that this manual is not useful on its own for self-diagnosis. A much better book for doing a kind of "self-triage" to determine if it's a good idea to go to a doctor is the "Merck Manual Go-To Home Guide for Symptoms". This Home Health Handbook is really only useful after a condition has been diagnosed, or as general reading for chronic conditions, or because the reader is really, really curious about medical conditions.This book is so readable, I think it would be possible, given sufficient years of reading time, to read it all through, or at least skim over the pages to get an overview of health issues for future reference. But 322 articles in 2100 pages is a bit daunting though.The printing and binding of this book are extremely good. It's a really "nice to possess" book which looks like it's intended to last a hundred years. The index, by the way, is also very good.Concerning whether this is really the 2nd or 3rd edition, yes it is the 3rd edition. The copyright page iv is confusing on this point, but when you read the following page v, it's clear that the 1st edition was 1997, 2nd edition was 2003, and this 3rd edition is 2009.