GENERAL MEDICAL LITERATURE REVIEW
We in this section offer commentaries on a broad survey of recent articles. These articles are mostly chosen for two reasons: their potential translational value for immediate clinical practice or to help in determining where clinical practice might evolve to. Today’s subjects are of general medical interest.
eLife lost its “impact factor”
In a warning shot to the bow of other medical journals that are considering a switch to the novel publishing model of the eLife journal, Clarivate – the company which publishes the metric of the “impact factor” announced that simply performing a peer review after publication and neither accepting or rejecting papers, “does not meet the standard of a peer review journal,” to which an eLife’s Executive Director, Damian Pattinson, PhD, responded that “the journal impact factor is a very corrosive metric, one that we’ve never supported or publicized” (1).
Biden administration prosecutes physician who spoke out against gender transition treatments
Eithan Haim, MD; Source: Mark Felix, The Free Press
A general surgeon in Texas by the name Eithan Haim, MD, may, as The Free Press reported, end up in prison for speaking out against gender transition treatments at a children’s hospital (2). The federal government during the Biden administration accused him violating HIPAA when he revealed that a Texas Children’s Hospital was providing gender transition treatments to minors after the hospital had announced that such services had been paused. By being charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with four felony counts, he is threatened with up to 10 years of prison for blowing the whistle on the hospital. This started when he was still a surgical resident. One can only hope that the new Justice Department under the Trump administration will quickly withdraw the threat to a young physician at the beginning of his career who fulfilled his first obligation as a physician, - to prevent harm to patients!
References
1. Brainard J. Science 2024;386(6724):839
2. Bartlet T. The Free Press. December 3, 2024. https://www.thefp.com/p/biden-prosecution-eithan-haim-gender-care-childrens-hospital-transitions