Editorial

Time to revisit Dr Finlay's casebook? The unique potential of the general practice case report

Christian D Mallen

• Correspondence: Christian D Mallen c.d.mallen@cphc.keele.ac.uk

Author Affiliations

Arthritis Research Campaign National Primary Care Centre, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, UK

Cases Journal 2009, 2:119 doi:10.1186/1757-1626-2-119

Published: 3 February 2009

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

Case reports have played a crucial role throughout the history of medicine. They have been used to describe rare and exceptional diseases, illustrate diagnostic or therapeutic procedures, challenges, actions, errors, and their outcomes [1,2]. In the modern era of evidence-based medicine, large-scale population based research and randomised clinical trials we ought not to mourn the passing of eponymous diseases and authoritarian diatribes. But there is still something deeply engaging in the case report that provides a detailed account of an individual patient. It is a form of sharing medical knowledge that general practitioners ought to be at the forefront of. Furthermore it is within the grasp of each and every general practitioner to make their contribution. So what's holding us back?