[1][2][3] He was editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) from 1977 to 1991, where he instituted two important policies: one asking the popular press not to report on articles before publication and another requiring authors to disclose conflicts of interest.

Although an antibiotic called streptomycin had finally been developed by that time, Relman eschewed the opportunity to use it as he feared its side effects which were most toxic.

The years of rest without streptomycin delayed his career and during this time he read Thomas Mann's novel "Magic Mountain" about the experience of patients in a tuberculosis sanitarium.

He deplored the increasing treatment of health care in the US as a "market commodity" distributed according to a patient's ability to pay, not medical need.

He believed that the solution would come only by two fundamental structural reforms: implementation of a single-payer financing system like Medicare without investor-owned private insurance companies and provision of a non-profit delivery system, with multi-specialty groups of physicians paid by salary within a preset budget.

[11] In 1999, Relman participated in a Harvard Medical School debate on the subject of unionization of physicians and for-profit health care.