Memo From The Editor

Your thoughts

Marianne Dekker Mattera

For 80 years, Medical Economics has brought doctors expert advice on practice management and personal finance. Staff writers and editors have interviewed hundreds of medical management consultants, financial advisers, and experts in taxes, insurance, liability, and public policy. We've scoured tons and tons of court documents, investment analyses, and other source material.

But all that interviewing, all that digging would produce a pretty dry magazine if we didn't have input from those actually living the experiences. So we interview doctors when examples will best illustrate a point or when a dry story needs a face. And we run a writing contest so that readers can hear the actual voices of their peers on subjects that the "experts" can't possibly understand—the kinds of things that only those who deal with life and death, sorrow and fear on a deeply personal level can write.

We also take polls and surveys, to get a broader spectrum of opinion. Sometimes, we go to a large, randomly selected sample of physicians for results that are projectable to the universe. Sometimes we publish questions in the magazine and ask you to fax back the response. Sometimes we e-mail the more than 400 physicians who've volunteered to be members of our Kitchen Cabinet for input on a particular topic. Twice a month we post a poll based on one of the articles in the current issue on our Web site, www.memag.com , and we report the results in our Update department.

All these outreach methods help us capture the thoughts and feelings of our readers—of the medical profession.

We're hoping to capture more of those thoughts and feelings with a new, regularly recurring series, "What would you do?" You'll find the first installment here. A doctor shared with us—and with you in this article—a dilemma she and her colleagues on a hospital medical staff faced when blatantly confronted with another physician's wrongdoing. We know the end of the story, but we'd like to see what you would have done in a similar situation. We present you with some options and we'd like you to tell us which you'd choose. We'll report both your votes and the actual outcome in a later issue. Other installments in the series may not have an ending when we publish them, but we'll give you a scenario and ask what you'd do. Then we'll get an ethicist's input on the dilemma and your responses.

We hope that this series will engage you, will make the magazine even more interactive, more a voice for physicians than it is now. If you have a scenario you'd like your colleagues to consider, send it to us. We want your thoughts. We want you to share them with us, to share them with others. They're worth a lot more than a penny!

To us, they're priceless.

 

Marianne Mattera. Memo from the Editor : Your thoughts. Medical Economics Jun. 6, 2003;80:9.