I don’t know how well you keep up with your professional reading, but I gave up years ago.

Every day, my small desk is washed by tidal waves of paper and journals that even the speediest reader could never hope to wade through, especially after a long day with patients.

In my training days, I used to blithely toss old journals into the wastebasket across the house-staff lounge when my locker got too full. I called this “the 20-foot journal toss,” giving the menial chore a jaunty Olympian sound. I now have a recycling bag strategically located in the small gap between my desk and the bookcase, and when the piles become high enough to teeter, I quietly transfer the almost-pristine journals into the bag.

I know what you’re thinking: There are doctors in third-world countries who would love to have my discarded journals. I’ve checked this out. Numerous organizations help provide such resources to developing countries, but what they really want is a donation of money, not the journals themselves.

Recycling presents another, more subtle issue. Perhaps bystanders would stop off at the local dumpster with their piles of newspapers, see my glossy journals, and think, “What kind of doctor throws away journals? They look as if they haven’t even been read.” I fretted that some local sleuth would publicly shame me.

For a while, I was stuck. I could no longer bring myself to jam the journals into the wastebasket, I couldn’t give them away, and even recycling wasn’t completely free of risk. My current solution is sneakier: I transport the journals and the household recycling to the dumpster at the same time, put the journals in first and throw the bags of newspapers on top.

Most medical journals are available online, but – sadly for the environment – there is not usually any discount for choosing an electronic subscription. Having a pile of journals sitting on my desk is messy, but at least the pile goads me into a little bit of reading. A virtual journal sitting in my e-mail inbox is not going to have that beneficial effect.

Dr. Greenbaum is a rheumatologist who practices in Greenwood, Ind.

Commentary

Dr. Greenbaum fails to mention the single most important reason why he shouldn’t feel guilty. That reason, of course, is that only a few of the articles are worth reading, and the time spent figuring out which ones they are would not be time well spent. At Journal Club with my residents yesterday, we reviewed the report of a big, multicenter, European study published in a top English-language medical journal, but it was so flawed that it should never have been accepted.