An example of genre shift in the medicinal product information genre system

Medical writers and translators need information of three kinds: conceptual, contextual and textual. When in possession of this information, they can progressively improve their efficiency. Textual genre has proved to be useful to linguistic mediators of professional texts, providing them with the communicative and textual competence required. I suggest that the scope of textual genre can usefully be widened to include the notion of genre systems. This notion can be particularly useful for obtaining contextual information and understanding complex communicative activities in professional groups and can help enhance the professional competence of medical writers and translators. This paper has a two-fold objective: to describe the dynamic continuum of medical communication that operates in the genre system constituted by product information genres in the pharmaceutical sector also considering the restraints, genre conventions and sequence imposed by metagenres; and to illustrate the intralinguistic genre shift translation process that takes place between the summary of product characteristics and the package leaflet.

Emerging Subspecialties in Neurology: Becoming an Editor-in-Chief

An Editor-in-Chief leads the editorial team and supervises the daily tasks required to prepare articles for publication, while at the same time managing the overall content and style of the journal. To become Editor-in-Chief, one must have dedicated work ethic, close attention to detail, passion for the editorial process, and a keen ability to work with and give feedback to section editors and authors. For this article, we interviewed Dr. Steven L. Lewis, Dr. Joseph E. Safdieh, and Dr. S. Andrew Josephson about their collective experience of becoming Editors-in-Chief of Continuum, Neurology Today, and JAMA Neurology, respectively. We have compiled tips for aspiring medical writers and editors, based on their expert advice, to guide trainees in this potential career path.

Medical Writing: Write your Way to Six-Figures and Beyond

Medical writing is a broad term for a vast 3-billion-dollar industry. The industry is large enough to accommodate all types of medical writers and health care communicators who can contribute in various ways. For example, some medical writers assist with medical education, such as continuing medical education (CME), slide-decks, textbooks, needs assessments, and patient education. Other medical writers may work in medical journalism, research documents, medical marketing, regulatory document preparation, or scientific publication and presentations. This article discusses ways for pharmacists to enter this field and is an extension of the ASCP provided webinar, which can be accessed here.

Addiction, Intoxicants, and the Humoral Body

Taking the humoral body as its spatial focus, this article considers how medical writers and practitioners engaged with ‘intoxicants’ both in terms of the prescription of medicines and in the conceptualization of compulsive consumption – or what is often styled by modern practitioners as ‘addiction’. Focusing in the first instance on the compilers of vernacular pharmacopoeia – compilations of medical ingredients and techniques – the article argues that just as sugar, tobacco, and especially opiates had a significant and possibly transformative role in everyday physic, so the ‘operation’ of opiates, distilled spirits, and tobacco was crucial in stimulating new thinking about how bodies became substance-dependent. The article also argues, however, that, in order to conceptualize the problem, writers turned to the venerable language of custom rather than the relatively new language of addiction – in particular, the ancient idea of custom as ‘second nature’.

A104 PREVALENCE OF GHOST-AUTHORSHIP IN INDUSTRY-SPONSORED CLINICAL TRIALS

Background Ghost-authorship involves the exclusion of individuals who have made substantial contributions to the article from the author byline. Previous studies have found that ghost-authorship is highly prevalent in industry-sponsored clinical trials. Its prevalence, however, has yet to be investigated in trials of biologics in the management of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Aims To determine the prevalence of ghost-authorship in IBD biologic industry-sponsored clinical randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Methods Biologic medications indicated for ulcerative colitis (UC) or for Crohn’s disease (CD) were identified using the Food and Drug Agency (FDA) database. We identified the clinical trials on clinicaltrials.gov corresponding to the data presented at the time of FDA approval. Specifically, we included the first publication for each trial to report study results for our analysis. Two authors independently identified the presence of ghost-authorship, which we defined as the exclusion on the author byline of the included RCT publication of any individuals who assisted in the writing of the trial manuscript and/or performed the data analyses. Results We identified a total of 28 relevant RCTs on biologic medications (10 for UC and 18 for CD), which were matched to 20 publications. We found ghost-authorship in 70% of publications (n=14); 40% (n=8) involved manuscript and protocol writing assistance from sponsor staff; 35% (n=7) involved medical writers from external companies; 15% (n=3) involved both sponsor staff and medical writers assisting in manuscript writing; and 20% (n=4) involved individuals performing data analysis or interpretation. Conclusions We found that ghost-authorship in industry-sponsored IBD biologic clinical trials has a moderately high prevalence, with the most common being manuscript or protocol writing assistance. A lack of transparency regarding sponsor-affiliated and/or external contributors may negatively affect the trust placed in medical research. One limitation is that data was only extracted from publications. Further evidence on ghost-authorship may be found in study protocols and registrations, which will be investigated in the future. Funding Agencies None

The Werewolf in the Ancient World

The ancient world already cherished a rich folklore of werewolfism that broadly resembled the one copiously attested for the central medieval period in Europe. Our best access to the sort of narrative that underpinned such folklore comes in the well-known werewolf tale of the Neronian Petronius’ Satyricon, which shares some striking motifs with the equally famous AD 1160-78 Anglo-Norman tale of Bisclavret by Marie de France. It was, accordingly, folklore that determined the ancients’ conception of what a werewolf actually was. Almost all the evidence for werewolfism in antiquity should be regarded either as folkloric in nature or as secondary to and refractive of a folkloric core. The ancients re-deployed, finessed and parlayed this focal conception in distinct ways in diverse cultural contexts. Notions, themes and images were borrowed from this folkloric home and transferred, in as it were a metaphorical fashion, to other realms of human experience and endeavour, be this: aetiological myth, in the case of the material bearing upon Lykaon; rites of passage or of maturation, in the case of the material bearing upon the Lykaia rite; or medicine, in the case of the medical writers’ identification of the disease of ‘lycanthropy.’ It is this that accounts for what initially appears to be the incoherent, chaotic and centrifugal nature of the evidence-field for werewolves that the ancients have bequeathed to us.

“Look At It Carefully Now”: Athenian Tragedy And The “Talking Cure”

It is often suggested that the Greek tragedians present clinically credible pictures of mental disturbance. For instance, some modern interpreters have compared the process by which Cadmus brings Agave back to sanity in Euripides’ Bacchae with modern psychotherapy. But a reading of medical writers’ views on the psychological dimension of medicine offers little evidence for believing that these scenes reflect the practices of late fifth-century Athenian doctors, for whom verbal cures are associated with older traditions of non-rational thought, and thus are scorned in favor of more “scientific cures” based on diet or medication. This paper will argue that Athenian tragedians, working from older traditions that advocated verbal cures for some mental ailments, do understand the potential psychological effects that their work can have on audiences, since tragedy requires psychological interaction with its audience in order to be effective. From a close reading of select scenes in Euripidean tragedy, this paper suggests that the experiences of the characters who experience suffering in Euripides’ Heracles and Bacchae are analogues of the experiences undergone by the spectators of tragedy at large. Parallels are made between the way that Agave and Heracles are both talked back to sanity by looking upon what has happened, and the way that tragedians make their audiences observe lamentations and meditations that follow the central tragic act, to help them return from the intense emotion provoked, perhaps, by the violence they have seen.