World's most important medical journal?

That's easy - there are only four types to consider when announcing a really important medical discovery.

Number four - but way at the bottom - is announcing a new medical discovery in the pages of something like LANCET or JAMA, the journals that medical doctors read .

Number three would be if that new medical discovery got reported in NATURE or SCIENCE, the journals that scientists read.

Number two would be if that new medical discovery ended up on the business pages of THE NEW YORK TIMES, the pages that the men with money read.

But all of these still remain near the bottom in importance in their ability to move a discovery out of the lab and into the GP's handbag - quickly.

Doctors,scientists and businessmen do many worthy things, but moving quickly is rarely one of them.

No,alone and way at the top as my choice to move people to action would be if that new medical discovery became attached to a human face and ended up on the pages of a women-oriented magazine in your neighbourhood supermarket's magazine stands.

 Doing so, directs it to the immediate attention of........ "DOCTOR MOM".

Don't believe me ?

That's what happened back in August 1943, when Dante Colitti and CITIZEN HEARST put their heads together to make the wartime government of FDR stop focusing on killing long enough to think about the living.

At the beginning of August 1943, I bet one educated person in a million worldwide could tell you what penicillin was. By the end of September 1943, I bet 90% not only could tell you but also wanted to know why their government wasn't making it available to their citizens like yesterday .

Fifteen years earlier, penicillin had first become privately known, to Alexander Fleming.

Fourteen years earlier, penicillin had first become publicly known - as scientists are wont to say in their self-absorbed way- when it was published in a peer-reviewed journal with a few hundred readers.

And there it sat, in the British Museum of medical curios, basically unused.

It was only when penicillin became popularly known, virtually overnight 15 years later in August 1943, that it began to be used en masse to save lives.

Now getting the attention of DOCTOR MOM , a very,very busy person, is never easy but once you do that, Ms or Mr Discoverer ---- stand back a safe distance and watch the wheels spin !

So, the top medical journal in the world ????

I'd rate THE LADIES HOME JOURNAL pretty high....