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EDITOR'S CHOICE: Fiona Godlee Nice feedback BMJ 2007; 335: 0 [Full text]

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He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help!

BM Hegde   (25 August 2007)

Searching a PDF

Pawan Randev   (1 October 2007)

He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help! 25 August 2007
BM Hegde, Retd. Vice Chancellor Mangalore 575 004, India Send response to journal: Re: He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help!	Dear Editor, The heading comes from a speech of Abraham Lincoln. Frustration at being rejected by editors is a common human trait. In a fit of anger, the authors would have written what they wrote. I still remember my former chief, Late Walter Somerville, editor of British Heart Journal for a long time, telling me, while I was working with him that, “an editor should budget to lose at least a couple of friends every week if s/he is fair.” I think he was right. That said I must also remind the reader about what Richard Smith once told me: “if I were to blindly swap the reject file for the accept file the BMJ would not be any different.” Both of them had been great editors. I vividly remember the great debate that went on for so long when Walter used the word “Tetrad of Fallot” in place of Fallot’s Tetrology in the 60s. Transatlantic cardiological community’s anger that single word replacement caused had to be read to be believed. With his master’s degree in English from Oxford, Walter was not one of those to be coved down that easily. Finally, the Americans had to admit their defeat! Sometimes even the great brains could get down to ordinary fights. The Lord Platt and George Pickering debate about the genetic basis of hypertension used to occupy most of the space in The Lancet and the BMJ in the 50s for months with tempers soaring high on both sides with many others taking sides. A considerate letter writer eventually had to call for a full stop. Linus Pauling could even manage to get a second Nobel Peace Prize for demonizing Edward Teller, the father of US atomic research, for showing that very small doses of radiation had a bio-positive effect on human health- radiation Hormesis! Pauling even got his own colleague, Edward Calbrese, removed from his post for showing that Vitamin C in small doses had a bio-positive effect while in larger doses it could have a bio- negative effect. (Hormesis). Calabrese, I think, won the case in a court of Law. You are in very distinguished company, Fiona Godlee, now that you are getting brickbats from your authors. NICE guidelines are very fair indeed! No one should doubt your authenticity. There are two sides to every coin! Yours ever, bmhegde Competing interests: None declared
Searching a PDF 1 October 2007
Pawan Randev, GP Measham Medical Unit Send response to journal: Re: Searching a PDF	Dear Editor "Clinicians don't read guidelines—and who can blame them, faced with hundreds of pages and unsearchable pdfs" As a clinician I agree that large guidelines are difficult to read and assimilate into daily clinical life. However PDF documents are searchable. If you look at the toolbar there is a binocular icon. Choosing this icon opens a search box to the right of the document. This will search the whole document for phrases and words. As an example, I searched a 150 page PDF file for "GP", "primary care", "RCGP", "community". The whole process, from opening the document to reading and considering the results took ten minutes. There is also a way of searching large Word documents. Pressing "CTRL" and F, opens up a search box which will go through the document. It may be worth reflecting that few professionals seem to have had training in these techniques. Competing interests: I am setting up an IT skills training organisation