Q&A: New journal series examines complex cases in infectious diseases
Key takeaways:
- Clinical Infectious Diseases has launched an article series looking in-depth at real cases and the clinical decision-making of ID physicians.
- The series is titled, “Clinical Dilemmas in Infectious Diseases.”
Clinical Infectious Diseases has launched a new series that will provide an in-depth look at real-life complex cases and the associated diagnostic and management decisions that ID clinicians deal with regularly.
The series, titled “Clinical Dilemmas in Infectious Diseases,” will “highlight, dissect and celebrate the complex cognitive skills” imperative to practicing in the ID field, ID specialists Daniel J. Minter, MD, and Varun K. Phadke, MD, wrote in a paper announcing the series.
They noted that other journals have published similar series and that the ID series will follow a similar format, with a focus on the unique challenges faced by ID practitioners.
“As we embark on this journey, we invite you to interact with the ... series and help it grow,” they wrote. “We encourage you to put yourself in the shoes of the discussants and navigate the difficult clinical decisions with them, to use the dilemmas that surfaced throughout each case as a jumping-off point to engage with learners and colleagues, and to find inspiration to identify and submit your own challenging dilemmas.”
We asked Minter, an assistant professor of ID at the University of California, San Franciso, for more information about the series, the logistics behind it and what readers can expect.
Healio: Where will you get the cases?
Minter: Cases for this series will come from the global ID community. We look forward to submissions from ID clinicians focusing on a variety of topics encountered by practitioners in our field. The first few cases were solicited and developed internally but, as word has gotten out about the series, we’ve received a number of outstanding submissions from across the world.
Healio: Will they be from actual encounters, or will they be made up for the series?
Minter: As with “clinical problem-solving” series in other journals, cases are derived from actual patient encounters (with relevant identifiable data changed). Real-life ID clinical encounters do not always follow what’s described in textbooks, so using actual cases helps to replicate the unique challenges and uncertainty faced by everyday clinicians. The discussants in these articles are blinded, and they are asked to provide their extemporaneous thoughts about how they would approach such a clinical encounter. The result allows us to see how expert clinicians think through difficult clinical scenarios and gain insights into their reasoning.
Healio: Can you tease some of the topics?
Minter: We hope to cover the breadth of ID clinical practice with this series, including transplant ID, HIV medicine, tropical medicine, general ID, pharmacology, mycobacterial disease and other topics relevant to ID clinicians.
Healio: How will you choose people to discuss the case? Are you looking for volunteers?
Minter: Discussants are most often solicited by the case authors, although we on occasion do help to connect authors with appropriate, blinded discussants.
Healio: What do you hope readers will get out of the series?
Minter: As ID clinicians, we think deeply about our patients. We are expert diagnosticians and often face challenging management decisions in the face of clinical uncertainty. While this ability to reason through complex situations is a core skill of our specialty, there are few avenues to explore how we as clinicians reason through patient encounters. As we highlight in our opening editorial, our goal for this series will be to feature, highlight and celebrate the amazing clinical reasoning performed by members of the ID community.
Healio: How will it differ from similar projects in other journals?
Minter: Certain other journals, mostly within the general medicine literature, have popularized the clinical problem-solving format — for example, The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Journal of Hospital Medicine. These journals often highlight challenging diagnoses, beginning with the patient’s symptoms and ending with a diagnostic reveal. In the series, we’re hoping to adapt this format for an ID audience. Not only will we focus on ID cases, from the vantage point of an ID clinician rather than that of a generalist, but we also aim to highlight the management decisions — in addition to diagnostic decisions — that we are faced with on a daily basis.
References:
For more information:
Daniel J. Minter, MD, can be reached at Daniel.Minter@ucsf.edu.
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