What professional curiosity can bring you

In its first issue of 2014, the European Journal of General Practice (EJGP) offers you a lot of food for thought. In the ‘EGPRN-EURIPA Abstracts’, the focus is on studies from rural family practice and studies that shed light on differences in primary care between rural and urban areas. In their keynote lectures, Richard Roberts and John Wynn-Jones both highlight the opportunities for primary care research that includes rural areas (pp. 40–41). Of course, we all should be motivated to engage in research; John Wynn-Jones calls for a revival of our ‘natural curiosity and inquisitiveness’. Every day, year-in-year-out, our practices offer a wealth of information (clinical data, data on health care organization, data on patient experiences), which can be harvested as never before with current information and communication technology.

Examples of research that could have started in your surgery are both papers on musculoskeletal problems, published in this issue. Le Goaziou et al. (France) suggest that in patients with diffuse musculoskeletal pain, we should think of testing for vitamin D deficiency since in these patients vitamin D supplementation may help in reducing pain and improving the quality of life (pp. 3–9). Skou et al. (Denmark) place reservations by the habit of making radiographs in patients with knee osteoarthritis. We only should order knee radiographs in patients in whom we cannot rule out serious pathology or other diagnoses (pp. 10–16).

The story by Irving (UK) is another example of where ‘inquisitiveness’ may lead you: a question from a patient on the effect of hepatitis ‘A’ vaccination led to a Cochrane review (and more) on this topic (pp. 74–77). ‘Inductive foraging’—i.e. being inquisitive to what your patient is experiencing—is the preferred mode of inquiry in the beginning of the consultation, Donner-Banzhoff and Hertwig (Germany) argue in their background paper on diagnostic reasoning. It can prevent diagnostic error by premature closure of the initial stage of the consultation (pp. 69–73).

Whilst Kouwenhoven et al. (the Netherlands) report on a (vignette) study among family physicians on caring for the dying—we have different preferences in patients with somatic versus psychosocial suffering (pp. 25–31)— Geelen et al. (the Netherlands) discuss the findings of a qualitative study among family physicians on caring for ‘cancer survivors’, i.e. patients who have survived the initial treatment period. Contrary to my experience that patients with cancer usually are ‘special’ to my colleagues and I; the authors report that cancer survivors often are not regarded as such. Dutch family doctors have a reactive—‘wait-and-see,’ ‘demand-driven’—approach to these patients. Do you recognize this? The authors discuss the international literature, from which one may conclude that although family doctors may express a willingness to play a more pivotal role in cancer follow-up care, the ‘conditions necessary for this are (…) far from optimal.’ The authors—being health scientists—challenge us to reflect on the organization of our services for these patients (pp. 17–24).

I hope these and the other papers in this issue will support your clinical work. The EJGP receives interesting submissions continuously, and we hope this will remain a reality for the future. You can support our editorial work by preparing your papers as well as you possibly can. Recent papers published in this journal by Aarts et al. may help to improve the statistical elements of your article (1,2). Other guidance to authors can be found in our ‘Instructions for Authors’ (http://informahealthcare.com/page/gen/Description#Instructions) or at the website of the Equator network (http://www.equator-network.org; also available in Spanish). Last year, the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology started publishing a highly readable series on effective writing and publishing of scientific papers (3). Finally, for your convenience I have made available on Slideshare a hand-out of an Editors’ workshop on ‘Writing for publication’ by Hans Thulesius and myself (http://www.slideshare.net/JelleStoffers/writing-for-publication-egprn-maltaoct2013handoutversion).