Back by popular demand

Welcome back to another year of the National Review of Medicine (NRM). The New Year brings a chance to reconnect with the people around you. In keeping with this spirit, we too are taking the opportunity to reach out to you, our readers. Thank you for making the first move and participating in our 2004 readership survey — your responses have been more than we could have hoped for. It was a pleasant surprise that most of you took time out of your busy schedules to answer our call for constructive criticism on NRM's coverage of the latest clinical research and health issues (for pdf of prize winners and to read your colleagues' comments link here).

It was extremely gratifying to see so many of you describe our paper as "easy-to-read" and "entertaining." Not surprisingly our pithy, punchy style of writing and our orderly format struck a chord with the vast majority of you. Never fear though, this high praise hasn't gone to our heads, and we will continue to uphold the high standards you've come to expect from NRM. In your words, we will strive to keep articles "interesting," "concise" and "timely."

As requested, we'll continue to feature a table of contents on the front page. Clinical research from around the world in our News in Brief section was extremely well read and will keep its position on page three, five and seven. Your calls for more on Practice Management, Personal Finance and What To Tell Your Patients have not fallen on deaf ears — plans are afoot to expand these sections. For those of you who submitted article suggestions, please continue. You'll find your ideas peppered throughout our pages in this and future issues (turn to page 16 to find out more).

Not to lead you astray, the reviews weren't all sunshine and lollipops. Some readers were quick to point out areas for improvement. We realize that physicians are a discerning bunch and true to form you didn't hold back when it came to airing your criticisms. Some of you commented that our layout was too tight, so in this issue we've loosened up our spacing to make it more readable. Others had a bone to pick with the way the clinical references are presented. One reader suggested that a literature reference should be given at the end of each piece. Look for this change in the next issue. If you have any more beefs, please lay them on us. As you can see, we'll do something about it — within reason, of course.

When asked what you thought about NRM, comments such as "it helps my practice," "it's a good way to keep updated," "I have to steal a copy from my colleagues" and "I read it cover-to-cover" helped confirm our suspicion that there is a need in the physician community for a paper that reports the latest health news in a concise but comprehensive way. Thanks for reaffirming our raison d'être — to be as relevant to your practice as possible.

Look out for newer additions to NRM: health policy column The Pulse, med student trials and tribulations in Diary of a Doctor-in-Training and debate section Thrust & Parry. And please continue to tell us what you think of them. Also, keep on the lookout for more wacky, wild and inspiring physician profiles on the cover and in our Beyond-on-call section. I also hope you'll enjoy the story lineups, fabulous contests (for our latest, please turn to page 20 — to win one of 20 Bulova watches) and other surprises we have in store for you in 2005.

— Shereen Joseph, Editor