For Expert Perspectives on Clinical Challenges, authors review prior studies and then talk about how those studies informed their practice. We ask them to provide an algorithm that helps them decide what they do when a condition progresses to a certain stage in a similar subset of patients.
The point is to give the perspective of an expert colleague to fellows, trainees or any clinicians, regardless of their level of experience.
TR:So would this be akin to popping your head into the office of an expert rheumatologist and getting their thoughts on what they would do with a difficult case?
Dr. Solomon: Exactly. I’m lucky because I practice at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which is like rheumatology central. I can walk down the hall and knock on lots of experts’ doors. Most people don’t have that luxury.
Readers like these Expert Perspectives, and we hope trainees are finding them useful. The articles are not going to be our most widely cited papers, and they’re not meant to be. Rather, these are papers that our clinical audience reads and uses in their practices, so they are important to provide.
TR: Would you like to highlight any other initiatives under way at the journal?
Dr. Solomon: One of the things we’ve done for the past year-and-a-half is a type of review article that we call Immunology for the Rheumatologist (https://acrjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/art.42688).
There are a lot of advances in rheumatology that are beyond what most of us learned in medical school, and it’s hard to keep up with them if you’re not an immunologist. But at the same time, immunology underpins rheumatology, so all rheumatologists want some basic understanding of the current state of affairs for immunology.
What we do in these approximately bimonthly articles is address immunology through the context of a case, which is more interesting and more easily digested than reading a typical, dry immunology textbook.
TR: Can you provide an example?
Dr. Solomon:Sure. Let’s say you have a patient with lupus nephritis and are thinking about using drug X. An Immunology for the Rheumatologist article would discuss the immunologic basis of drug X for these patients, how the drug works and what’s going on in the kidney when patients take that drug.
The idea is to weave immunology into clinical practice for clinicians. (Editor’s note: See the summaries of these articles: www.the-rheumatologist.org/tag/immunology.)
