A peer-reviewed, digital-only journal of first-person illness accounts, written by the clinicians who lived them. We publish what instruments cannot measure: the felt texture of symptom, surgery, and recovery.
Objective data remains essential. But the structured recording of subjective experience has been neglected — and that omission costs us twice. It costs us at the bedside, and it starves the diagnostic tools of the future of the one thing they cannot infer: what illness actually feels like.
Bridge the gap between clinical signs and human reality — the sensations, progressions, and subtle changes standard descriptions overlook. The wisdom that cannot be queried in a database.
AI doesn’t know the difference between a wet bronchial cough and a dry tickle. As a clinician you know the mechanism; as a human you know the feeling. Connect them — and teach the machine what it feels like to be alive.
No publication bias, by design. We require no novelty and no result — positive or negative. The only acceptance criterion is that a lived phenomenon is well described. Authored only by licensed clinicians who have personally lived the condition.
As a child, I used to wonder what it felt like to have a beard. My own face was smooth and soft. My father’s face, if he hadn’t shaved for a day or two, felt rough and scratchy — it hurt my hand to touch it. Didn’t it hurt him, too?
My grandfather was a giant of a man, strong enough to lift things I couldn’t even budge. Yet whenever he tried to stand from his armchair, he would groan and clutch his lower back. I could spring out of bed and run across the room in three seconds; it took him minutes just to get on his feet. I simply couldn’t grasp the sensation of his reality.
When I was six I wanted to put the radio on the balcony so everyone could hear it. “People would be disturbed,” my father said. That was the day I learned not everyone likes the same things — my first lesson in subjectivity.
Throughout my medical career, I realized clinical knowledge often fails to capture this sensory landscape. When I passed a kidney stone in medical school, I tried to explain the agonizing, nauseating waves of cramping to a resident. He knew the pathophysiology, but having never experienced it, he couldn’t comprehend the agony. A urologist who has never passed a stone knows the condition — but not the nuances of suffering.
The turning point arrived when I became a patient again, this time with cervical myelopathy. Despite being an orthopedic surgeon, I mistook my own numbness for carpal tunnel syndrome, delaying my diagnosis for months. During recovery I realized even my own surgeon and colleagues didn’t fully grasp the strange symptoms I was describing. I couldn’t find these details in any textbook. I encountered them only in the depths of online health forums, where ordinary patients shared their experiences with one another.
When you are a physician, you think you know illnesses. This is a form of educated arrogance. It takes becoming a patient to realize you understand the nuance of disease far better than the doctors treating you. As junior doctors, we dismissed elderly patients who described pain “twisting like a snake.” Yet those descriptions were perfect clues. By pushing aside anecdotal teaching for strict evidence-based medicine, we lost a wisdom that cannot be queried in a database.
That is why Well Described was born — to collect high-fidelity descriptions of bodily functions, sensations, and diseases, written by the world’s only true experts on the subject: the patients. Not just any patients — those who themselves work in medicine.
Conventional case reports were built for objective findings. We invented new article types, new evidence levels, and new safeguards so the felt dimension of illness can finally be recorded with rigor.
The author lived the illness in the past and describes it from memory — a foundational account, honest that memory reconstructs events rather than replaying them.
An illness diary kept in the moment of experience. Higher quality precisely because it mitigates recall bias — the symptom recorded as it happened, not as remembered.
Anchor a subjective account in objective analysis without diluting it. An orthopedic surgeon writes about their own depression; a psychiatrist adds a sidebar on the neurobiology of the symptoms described.
For stigmatized conditions, the Editor-in-Chief verifies identity, license, and records internally — then publishes under a pseudonym, so fear of licensure repercussions never silences an account.
For a single bodily function rather than a whole illness: the itch from two distinct insect bites, numbness from two anesthetics, the burning of micturition after a specific drug. Small, precise, important.
Every entry is coded for machine and clinician alike: ICD-11 code, symptom-ontology tags, and timeline integers — structured so the archive is searchable and machine-readable from day one.
Standard studies are classified as retrospective or prospective. We bring the same distinction to the case report — because memory reconstructs events rather than replaying them.
Written after the fact, from memory. Valuable and welcome — the account most clinicians can offer about an illness already behind them.
A diary kept during the illness itself. Higher fidelity, because the sensation is captured before memory can revise it.
No print, no issues, no waiting for a publication window. A case accepted on a Tuesday is published that Tuesday. And until we are formally indexed, every manuscript is published at no cost to the author.
Conventional journals batch articles into monthly or quarterly issues. We don’t. Each account goes live the moment it clears peer review — any day, any specialty.
A permanent, searchable, structured repository — designed from the first entry to be read by clinicians and parsed by machines, never bound and stored.
For the first years, before indexing, publication is entirely free. We begin to charge only once the journal is indexed — and reviewer credits offset that cost when we do.
Every manuscript, every author, no charge. This is the period we’re collecting our first reports and building toward indexing.
$0 — all submissionsOnce indexed, a publication fee applies. Reviewers who’ve earned credits apply them here to publish at a reduced price.
Fee − reviewer creditsPeer review is the labor that holds a journal together — so we reward it directly. Each review you complete earns credit points. When publication fees begin after indexing, you spend those points to publish at a discounted price.
The clinicians who give the most to the archive are the ones who pay the least into it. That is the whole idea.
Take on a manuscript in your specialty through the editorial desk.
A thorough, on-time review adds credit points to your reviewer account.
Points accrue across every review you complete — there’s no expiry race.
Once fees apply post-indexing, spend credits to lower — or offset — the cost of publishing your own account.
In this first version of the journal, the path is deliberately direct — your manuscript reaches a human editor, not a form.
Document chronology, sensations, treatments, and reflections — clinical accuracy from a living perspective, not literary embellishment.
Attach the full diagnostic record — labs, imaging, and clinical notes that verify the diagnosis behind the experience.
Send everything to the editorial desk. Choose your article type and note any request for verified pseudonymity.
After peer review, your account goes live immediately and joins a permanent, structured, openly accessible archive.
Each submission must include a verified diagnosis, a precise chronology, qualitative description — often compared with other conditions known to the author — and a record of treatments and their effects.
Exact onset sequence and temporal evolution — first signs to current state or full recovery timeline.
Contrast each symptom with other conditions the author has felt — “sharper but shorter than my prior tendinitis.”
Medications and procedures — timing, intensity, benefits, drawbacks, and unexpected consequences alike.
Activities or environments that aggravate or relieve symptoms, and how predictable those patterns are.
The taste of a medication, the pain of an injection, the discomfort of physiotherapy — recorded precisely.
Emotional states through the illness, plus 3–5 points on what colleagues should learn — and what you’d have missed as a doctor.
The goal is a permanent, standardized archive that reflects the subjective human dimension of medical care while meeting the rigor of the literature.
Every diagnosis is supported by complete medical records — labs, imaging, and clinical notes from the illness period.
Authors consent to publication of the medical and personal information they include — and verified pseudonymity protects the vulnerable.
Non-native English speakers may refine language with AI — but tools must never invent or alter any experiential detail. The voice stays the author’s.
If you are a healthcare professional who has lived through illness, your account can help create a resource that benefits today’s clinicians and shapes the diagnostic tools of the future.
We are opening with a search for our first reports. In this first version of the journal, manuscripts are received by email — and reviewed personally by the editorial desk.
No portal yet — and that’s deliberate. Your first report reaches a human editor, not a form.