Choosing a reflective form and an outlet
Medical experience can be published in forms other than the research report and the review article: an essay on one's own practice, a personal narrative, a piece of medical history, an image quiz, a film review, and poems, stories and memoirs. Each form has outlets that run it, and a piece is prepared to look like what its outlet already publishes.
Finding an outlet
A writer who aims at one of these forms should first identify the target publication, then prepare the submission so that it looks like the pieces that publication has already published.
These forms produce pieces shorter than a typical review article, but the pieces are no easier to write or to get published: every submission is reviewed, by peers or by a knowledgeable editor, and competes for space in the journal. Each form has its own characteristics and requirements.
A professional association can offer an outlet of its own. In 2008 the AMWA Journal ran a section, Member Musings, in which members could share personal essays related to medical writing and editing, creative work, and news of their achievements.
At AMWA's 2007 annual conference, about 50 members spent the first evening at a creative readings session, where fellow members read poetry, personal essays, a short story, a song parody, and excerpts from novels and memoirs, among them a memoir a member's father wrote and she edited for him. The session's chair planned to host it again the following year.
The forms and where they ran
The journals and magazines named here ran these forms in 2018, as examples of features found in a variety of publications.
Medical Economics, best known for staff-written articles on practice management and finances, published commentaries on its physician readers' experiences, among them one holding that educated patients who understand their illnesses and their management are more adherent and satisfied, which helps the practice succeed financially. Physicians Practice published physician-authored practice management articles, such as one titled "How I Avoid Burnout".
Personal narratives run as columns in many publications, such as JAMA's "A Piece of My Mind" and the narrative essays of Family Medicine, and give a writer the opportunity to write about something they feel strongly about. Their topics include insights from an encounter with a patient, thoughts about the future of medicine and reflections on how the profession affects the writer as a person. One such essay discussed providing medical care to jail inmates, and another chronicled a man with schizophrenia who was no longer institutionalised and his caregiver through his lung cancer, hospice and death. Publication is open to all, not only to members of prestigious academic departments, and a submission is judged solely on its merits: the impact of its message and the clarity of its writing.
Some journals publish articles on medical history, a favourite topic of many clinicians. The Pharos, for example, published one on Civil War medicine, which noted that supplying armies with fresh vegetables to prevent scurvy was always difficult, and one on how Lord Byron's clubfoot tormented him, in both physical pain and mental anguish.
An image quiz presents photographs or radiographs, supplied by authors with brief medical histories, and challenges the clinician reader to identify the diagnosis, which the journal presents later. Consultant ran such a continuing section, "Photo Quiz", and the NEJM a similar feature.
The Pharos ran a regular film review section, "Medicine in the Movies", which reviewed films such as The Fault in Our Stars. A journal's film review column tends to be written by the same person each month, but a writer can suggest such a column to a specialty journal that has none.
One medical writer who turned to mystery novels and short stories after more than 30 years of medical writing contrasted the two: writing about medicine is a slow-motion adventure, while switching to fiction is like hopping in a Corvette and flooring it.