Why do you think internal medicine journals have an impact factor? If they are important to the field, it suggests that the quality of the research and the relevance of the subject matter are important.
In a way, internal medicine journals are a reflection of the quality of the research. They are the primary means by which new ideas are discussed, not the sole means of information dissemination. We’re in medical research because of the scientific method, not because of some arbitrary and unwarranted metric of importance. Although we can’t exactly measure impact factor for the journals because they are not listed in the Web of Science, we do know that medical journals tend to have high impact factors.
There are several factors that influence the impact factor for medical journals. They can be a result of the research itself, the research team involved, the journal itself, the peer review process, or the publisher. For example, the American Journal of Roentgenology, the journal of the American Roentgen Society, is the top-ranked medical journal in the U.S. and is ranked number one in the top 100 in the world.
I don’t know about you, but I’d be pretty worried if I were a doctor and I saw one of these journals. There are a number of reasons why I’d be worried. If you’re a patient, you’re probably already familiar with this. If you’re a doctor, you’re probably already familiar with this. If you’re a researcher, you’re probably well aware of this. But for the average person who isn’t a doctor, I think you’ll find this pretty alarming.
In the past 10 years our medical journals have been rocked by several different scandals. The most recent being our article “Fluoride: A Disgrace” in the April, 2009 issue. Although we felt that we had done a good job, and as a result the editors of the journal felt we had to be more careful. We felt that the article was a bit misleading for both the general public and for the readers of the journal that were not doctors.
I think the most disturbing thing about our article is not that we were wrong or even that our conclusions were wrong, but that the way we were presented. Many of the readers of journals are not medical professionals, and as a result they are presented with things that are not quite right.
In the article we were presented with a number of highly questionable or at worst, completely wrong statements about medical treatments and procedures. For instance, we were told that there were studies showing that acupuncture is ineffective for treating back pain. This is true, but a number of the studies that we present are flawed. The most egregious example of this is the one that shows that acupuncture is effective for a number of things, but not for back pain.
This is a particularly painful accusation to make since the studies we present have been peer-reviewed and published in medical journals. They are not just presented without controversy, but published with full of good research.
The problem with acupuncture is that it’s an ineffective treatment for many disorders. Acupuncture is a form of “mind-body medicine,” and is commonly practiced by a large number of people in Asia, but the evidence that shows it works is weak. The problem is that there have been thousands of studies that have shown that acupuncture can treat a wide variety of medical conditions, but none of them show that acupuncture is effective for back pain.
Acupuncture is not effective for chronic back pain because most of its effects are due to the placebo effect: the belief that the needles are numbing or even stimulating something in the body, and that it works. This doesn’t mean that we should stop using needles (that’s a good thing) but we should try to find better ways of delivering the treatment.