Reader response: Disputes, debates, dialogue, and dodgers

Ms. Rahkola and Dr. Galetta raised an important issue.1 Postpublication critical letter writing is a cost-effective well-balanced scientific activity that entails rational skepticism, explains bemusing data, keeps common sense center stage, exercises supremacy of logic over numbers, and requires the will to share insights on an ostensibly lower research platform.2 During peer review, correspondence may share the fate of innovative research, given the fact that peers also compete for journal columns, research grants, and fame.2,3 At the frontiers of science, peers, and peer reviewers—and sometimes editors—are jealous rivals who fight to preserve the preferred hypothesis.3 Critical comments are not irritating ego-stuttering pieces in prose, but show limitations of the past and the present paradigm while pointing to the future. Realistically, only few comments fall in this category. One of the main functions of editors is to keep egg off authors' faces,2,4,5 with few rare exceptions. It is a rare medical periodical that places such correspondence at the right level or grants it appropriate recognition with a separate URL and citation. With the advent of e-printing, at the level of the server, conceivably, there is really no limit on words and even images that might be submitted in correspondence.