Those Journals Keep Coming

More than a year has elapsed since retiring.  My two state licenses remain active.  My professional liability policies do not so I have no interest in seeing patients.  Yet being a doctor is more than seeing patients.  Sometimes keeping the patients as inviolable top priority displaced other opportunities.  Now, no patients, but no research prospects, teaching, or committees either.  I am left with my knowledge and accumulated insight.  It can no be expanded for its own sake.

Currently I have two paid subscriptions, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.  The former comes weekly with a handful of articles.  I read all titles, abstracts of interest, and at least two articles ranging from core research to opinion.  I've largely stayed on track.  The JCEM arrives monthly.  It is bulky, fewer reviews, largely studies more appropriate to research groups doing similar investigation, but with clinical studies that are sometimes intriguing, more often pedantic.  It comes as part of my Endocrine Society membership.

Everything else is a freebie.  Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Cleveland Clinic Journal which is mostly topic reviews, JAMA Endocrinology, Lancet Endocrinology, and a couple of newspaper sized publications but glossier that have mostly news reports of current research or opinions of experts who seem to be interviewed by journalists.

All are available electronically but the only one I read that way is sometimes the NEJM. 

Clutter can get out of hand.  The ones I pay for stay for a year, the other journals three months, the newspaper sized publications the current and previous months.  They are recyclable.  I don't think I've ever retrieved one from the storage box to read it.  When I want to retrieve anything from the NEJM, I do it electronically. 

By now I know what I like to read, brief reviews, case of the week, and opinions on the experience of being a doctor.  For their own sake.