What Makes a Write Good Medical Right?
Experience in a diversity of areas, interest, error (corrected, unlike the headlineExcept they's really not errors; they're a form of—here it comes—pun.
What, you expected me to admit to a twisted sense of humor? ), and a touch of perfectionism. This sets the stage for good writing, and working and studying in a variety of medical-communications realms hones the other aspect.
Some specificsYea, verily, a trifle dry, but, begorra, I know not how to leaven them.
They do, howe'er, support experience of the relevant sort. :
- I have abstracted and incorporated published clinical research and other pertinent articles on several hundreds of drugs, vitamins, and substances into an international drug database. The project required searching of the medical literature, interpreting research design and statistical methods, abstracting and summarizing key medical information, reconciling contradictions, and incorporating any changes into an existing database.
- I have written monographs for an alternative-medicine database and currently proof and edit a CAM journal, Integrative Medicine: A Clinician's Journal (IMjournal.com).
- I have experience in substantive editing of original articles, reviews, and case reports for medical journals, sometimes working with authors whose English is not native.
- At one point I acted as both editor and art director for an alternative-medicine journal, "Oriental Medicine". In addition to assisting authors in more clearly presenting their ideas, I authored articles for that publication and produced cover art and article illustrations.
- Working with a veterinary oncologist, I have compiled patient-education materials relating nutrition and cancer; working alone, I have written and published articles pertaining to cancer, as you can see by perusing the list to your right.
- I have been the pre-publication author-editor for a veterinary oncology textbook written by Gregory K. Ogilvie, DVM, who at that time was at the Comparative Oncology Unit of the Veterinary Teaching Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado.
- I developed and taught upper- and lower-division distance-learning courses in cognitive psychology and human sexuality for the Departments of Psychology and Continuing Education at Colorado State University. I learned first-hand how disruptive it can be to one's semester planbook when the text is revised.
- As a graduate student I designed and supervised scientific experiments, and published peer-reviewed articles on effects of drugs of abuse during pregnancy on food intake in the rat. Another research interest was food preferences and their effects on human and animal metabolism.
So, you can see that if nothing else my background is diverse. In addition and not suitable for listing is a tendency I have to become interested in that on which I write, with one notable exceptionLaw.
Proving something if not the rule. .
