Interesting Case
Submitting a case
Interesting Case publishes cases sent in by practising clinicians. Use the form below to submit one. The cases worth reading are rarely the rarest ones; they are the cases where a decision was genuinely difficult and where another clinician, meeting the same presentation next month, would benefit from knowing how it went.
A case is worth submitting if it turns on something transferable: a presentation that was initially read as something else, a finding that changed the plan, a complication recognised early or late, a treatment decision made without clear guidance, or an outcome that did not follow from what looked like sound reasoning. Cases that did not go well often teach more than cases that did, and they are welcome.
What to include
- The presentation. How the patient arrived, the relevant history and examination findings, and the working diagnosis at that point.
- The relevant investigations. Include the images or tracings that carry the case, with enough quality to be read. Leave out studies that add nothing.
- What the decision hinged on. This is the heart of the submission. State what the options were, what was known and unknown at the moment of decision, and why one option was taken over another. A narrative that reports what was done without saying why is not a teaching case.
- The outcome. What happened, including anything unexpected, and what you would do differently.
- The teaching point. One or two sentences on what a reader should take away.
Consent and anonymisation
Every patient image or identifier must be anonymised before submission. Remove the name, hospital and record numbers, date of birth, institution and referring clinician, and check the image itself as well as the file: identifiers are commonly burnt into image corners, printed in tracing headers, or left in file names and metadata. Written consent from the patient, or from the person legally able to consent on their behalf, is required for publication of any patient image or identifiable detail, and contributors must also meet what their own institution requires.
Review and publication
Submissions are reviewed by the editorial team before anything appears on the site. Review covers clinical content, teaching value and the consent and anonymisation requirements, and you may be contacted for clarification. Submission does not guarantee publication.
Before writing, it is worth looking at how cases are handled here. The Medical Image feature is the shorter companion format, built around a single image and one teaching point, and is often the better home for a case that turns entirely on an image. For the level of detail a full case discussion aims at, see a published reference piece such as the bedside reference on no-reflow during PCI.
