The American Medical Association, publisher of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) proudly celebrated the three year of also publishing the Journal of Obvious Medical Advancements (JOMA). In the competitive world of medical journals, JOMA appears to fill an unmet niche and is popular on teaching rounds.
Modern medical care relies heavily on evidence based medicine, but often many aspects of patient care seem to lack the true rigor of scientific validation. This fact is particularly troubling for some young physicians and medical students.
Dr. Joel Robbin, an intern at Southeastern New England Medical Center, challenged his attending on rounds about the lack of evidence based care. Dr. Robbins commented, “we admitted a patient with severe pneumococcal pneumonia and hypoxemia. His room air saturation was only 84%. My attending asked why I did not put him on O2 but left him hypoxemic overnight. I told him I could not find evidence to do this. He’s so old school he doesn’t know the literature.”
Dr. Albert Birchtree, the hospitalist attending was quite flabbergasted. “The young Dr. Robbins was adamant that there was no evidence for putting the patient on oxygen. Fortunately, I remembered a recent article in JOMA (Oxygen for Hypoxemic Patients JOMA 2019) that showed oxygen helps in hypoxemic patients. I was happy to share it with my housestaff.”
While many cardiologists can often quote famous trials such TIMI, MADIT, and AFFIRM, JOMA was the first to publish ground breaking results like “Telemetry Monitoring in Patients Post MI,” or “Triple therapy with Warfarin, Enoxaparin, and Apixaban is associated with Increased Bleeds.” Nonetheless, the most common question asked by housestaff during rounds “when are rounds going to be over” has still not been answered in a randomized trial.
Unfortunately, many young academics rely of publishing and the impact score of their articles to advance in tenure tracks. After three years of release, JOMA still maintains and impact factor of zero.
