It's survived everything from smallpox and polio to AIDS and SARS, and this month marks the 100th birthday the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

The journal was started by Canadian doctors in 1911 as a forum to promote and share ideas. It now reaches 76,000 people a year in print and gets 30 million visits online.

"It's been there through thick and through thin, through two world wars, the discovery of insulin, through SARS, through two pandemics of influenza . . . this is pretty impressive," said Dr. Noni MacDonald, former editor of the journal and a doctor at Halifax's IWK Health Centre.

And it's done more than just record history. It's become a platform to advocate for health policy change.

Recently, doctors have used the publication to take a stand on controversial health issues including the benefits of safe injection sites, the risks of the MS liberation therapy and stronger labels on cigarette packages.

"Those are tough issues to take on because you are espousing issues that not everyone is espousing," MacDonald said. "As a physician you really need to be speaking out for health-care issues when the right decisions are not being made."

MacDonald is part of an illustrious group of editorial alumni. Sir Frederick Banting also sat on the editorial board of the journal, which featured his discovery of insulin a year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work.

Doctors have also turned to the journal to improve patient care both through new knowledge about diseases and medical conditions as well as new ways to administer medicine.

The journal's look at evidence-based practice in 2004 had a substantial impact on the way Dr. Paul Hebert, the journal's current editor-in-chief, practises medicine. Evidence-based medicine is about turning to the literature and published studies to find answers to a patient's ailments.

The journal has spearheaded a transition from doctors making educated guesses at bedside to a consistent practice of producing and acting on the research.

"Doctors in Canada tend to think about the research and the evidence base upon which they make decision more often than not and that's a good thing."

Communication challenges are coupling with medical challenges to be tackled in the next century.

"The biggest challenge for medical journals is how do we present the information in useful ways for doctors," says Hebert.

He added that in an age when people turn to Google for diagnoses, the journal is more important than ever.

"You need a dispassionate, unbiased, scholarly, peer-review publication that says on balance this is safe."

The journal is celebrating the milestone with a facelift and a look back at it's role on the face of medicine in the Jan. 11 issue.

And, while much has changed, some things have stayed the same.

"Our authors really want to try to improve the standards of medical care and that hasn't changed from the beginning," said MacDonald.

rlindell@postmedia.com

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