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Letter to the readers
DEAR READER
Health care reform fueled by rising health care costs continues to alter the landscape of medical practice. As a result, primary care providers thrust into the critical and difficult role of “gatekeeper” have been motivated to not only expand the spectrum of their practices but also the depth of care provided. To meet this challenge, primary care providers have had a variety of educational resources to refer to, including continuing medical education programming, “formal” and “curbside” consultations with specialists, and medical books and journals. For the busy clinician seeking answers from medical journals, the array of options currently available can be a source of frustration and disappointment. Many journals, particularly those generated by subspecialists, tend to be esoteric and overly detailed, failing to provide the “nuts-and-bolts” answers to specific questions that arise in clinical practice. Conversely, many primary care journals, although more reader-friendly, lack sufficient depth and expertise to provide the understanding and level of confidence required to comfortably deal with the variations and vagaries of real-world problems seen in everyday practice. To bridge this gap, clinicd CORNERSTONE’” has been expressly developed to provide the busy clinician with a time-effective, practice-oriented, authoritative, scientifically rigorous distillation of pertinent medical literature that is directly applicable to common problems seen in clinical practice. clinical CORNERSTONE’” employs a unique editorial format that blends the expertise and cutting-edge sophistication of top specialists in the field with the input and direction of expert clinician/teachers from the primary care community. Although a nationally recognized expert serves as guest editor of each issue and assists in the selection of thought leaders to serve as contributing authors, each step of the editorial process is guided and directed by an Advisory Board composed of primary care experts to ensure that clinical CORNERSTONE’” fulfills its promise of providing the latest bottom-line “best practice” approaches to problems commonly seen in primary care practice. An added feature of clinical CORNERSTONE’” is the inclusion of a “Dialogue Box” at the end of each article in which important, real-world questions not fully addressed in the article are posed to the expert by the Advisory Board in a questionand-answer format. This inaugural issue will focus on one of the most common preventive medical conditions seen in clinical practice, hyperlipidemia. For this issue, our guest editor, John C. LaRosa, MD, has done a superb job in bringing together a panel of expert contributors who provide the reader with the knowledge required to deal with this common condition and the clinical questions and challenges it poses in daily practice. Upon your completion of this material, the Advisory Board and I hope you’ll agree that cZinicaZ CORNERSTONE’” has met its goal of “bridging the gap between what a specialist knows and what you want and need to know,” and that you will find yourself managing common problems with the sophistication of a specialist. Sincerely,
Martin Quan,
MD
Editor iV
Health care reform fueled by rising health care costs continues to alter the landscape of medical practice. As a result, primary care providers thrust into the critical and difficult role of “gatekeeper” have been motivated to not only expand the spectrum of their practices but also the depth of care provided. To meet this challenge, primary care providers have had a variety of educational resources to refer to, including continuing medical education programming, “formal” and “curbside” consultations with specialists, and medical books and journals. For the busy clinician seeking answers from medical journals, the array of options currently available can be a source of frustration and disappointment. Many journals, particularly those generated by subspecialists, tend to be esoteric and overly detailed, failing to provide the “nuts-and-bolts” answers to specific questions that arise in clinical practice. Conversely, many primary care journals, although more reader-friendly, lack sufficient depth and expertise to provide the understanding and level of confidence required to comfortably deal with the variations and vagaries of real-world problems seen in everyday practice. To bridge this gap, clinicd CORNERSTONE’” has been expressly developed to provide the busy clinician with a time-effective, practice-oriented, authoritative, scientifically rigorous distillation of pertinent medical literature that is directly applicable to common problems seen in clinical practice. clinical CORNERSTONE’” employs a unique editorial format that blends the expertise and cutting-edge sophistication of top specialists in the field with the input and direction of expert clinician/teachers from the primary care community. Although a nationally recognized expert serves as guest editor of each issue and assists in the selection of thought leaders to serve as contributing authors, each step of the editorial process is guided and directed by an Advisory Board composed of primary care experts to ensure that clinical CORNERSTONE’” fulfills its promise of providing the latest bottom-line “best practice” approaches to problems commonly seen in primary care practice. An added feature of clinical CORNERSTONE’” is the inclusion of a “Dialogue Box” at the end of each article in which important, real-world questions not fully addressed in the article are posed to the expert by the Advisory Board in a questionand-answer format. This inaugural issue will focus on one of the most common preventive medical conditions seen in clinical practice, hyperlipidemia. For this issue, our guest editor, John C. LaRosa, MD, has done a superb job in bringing together a panel of expert contributors who provide the reader with the knowledge required to deal with this common condition and the clinical questions and challenges it poses in daily practice. Upon your completion of this material, the Advisory Board and I hope you’ll agree that cZinicaZ CORNERSTONE’” has met its goal of “bridging the gap between what a specialist knows and what you want and need to know,” and that you will find yourself managing common problems with the sophistication of a specialist. Sincerely,
Martin Quan,
MD
Editor iV