LAUSR

After more than 11 years of service to the Journal of Medical Case Reports (JMCR), I am writing these lines with mixed feelings, as this has been a wonderful journey and I am now becoming an “old-timer”... or evergreen (Fig. 1). First, I wish to thank the editor Prof. Michael Kidd for his leadership and trust in me as a deputy editor of the journal. Furthermore, I wish to thank all the deputy editors, especially Profs. Richard Rison and Jean Karl Soler for their collegiality. Together, and with the leadership of Prof. David Riley, we launched the CARE (CAse REport) guidelines in 2013 [1, 2]. With the help of the editorial staff, JMCR has become a success, with increasing submissions from all over the world. Initially residing in Australia when JMCR was launched, editor Prof. Kidd has now relocated to Toronto, Canada. I myself was born and raised in Nuremberg, Germany, and worked in the USA last from 2006 to May 2017 before relocating back to Germany. Since returning, I have encountered there an attitude change in physicians, with now less than 50% of medical doctors completing a dissertation compared to 25 years ago. Many younger physicians, but also, increasingly, older physicians, no longer trust statistical truth finder studies with conclusions that simply do not match up with the medical realities in individual patient care. On the other hand, many contemporary “scientific” medical studies with many known and unknown variables confirm what was already known, or is common sense, similar to the fact that one should typically not cross a red traffic light because an accident might happen (Shanks JA. Probability in action: the red traffic light. Journal of Statistical Education. 2007, Volume 15, Issue 1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10691898.2007.11889457). As stated by me in 2009 (https://casesnetwork.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/christian-koch-interview/), we are in an era of “evidence-based medicine.” However, we have finally begun to realize that much of the so-called evidence is derived from heterogeneous patient populations and is not necessarily applicable to our individual