Critical points of medical writing

An important part of clinical studies is often associated to write report, analyze data and do statistics. Commercial software are now available to facilitate data collection and management and the collaboration between institutions, but one difficult work still be the elaboration of the results and the creation of final report to be presented to approval committees. Thus, medical writing department assumes crucial role in a pharmaceutical company. This department must be organized in order to efficiently accomplish the production of promotional materials, documentation for marketing new products and manuscript for publication. Medical writing follows specific guidelines to guarantee scientific correctness and ethical standards. Indeed, results reported in papers, reviews and brochures must be rigorous, transparent and consistent; the writing must be comprehensible, accurate, concise and logically organized, all the assertions must be justified and proper terminology facilitates the proficiency. Medical and nursing professionals often don’t have time or inclination to write their papers, as well as in pharmaceutical companies results from unsuccessful clinical studies are not published again because of lack of time.

It’s astonishing that a large percentage of works presented in national meetings doesn’t proceed to publication in peer review journal. In this way the advances of science are avoided. Fortunately, professional medical writers can supply the important service to write papers and reviews and make these data available to scientific community. Medical writer are often ghost- writer and their name doesn’t appear between authors in the final publication, even if now a task force of European medical writer association (EMWA) tries to solve this problem. For transparency, indeed, the reader should always know about the presence of a ghost-writer and also the name “ghost-writer” itself is misleading; EMWA task force suggests the use of a more neutral term. Anyway, medical writing still stimulating and interesting work, because allows to enter in direct contact with clinical researchers and know results of studies before the publication itself. Not only physicians and scientists must be responsible of data truth, but also medical writer must learn about ethical practice: in this way, papers are really scientifically correct and scientific literature continues to have a significance. Furthermore, founding and grant achievement are often associated to the number and quality of publication of the principal investigator, so writing numerous papers represents an opportunity also to obtain financial advantages, rather than scientific. Publishing results allows to receive feedback about your study and useful suggestion for future perspectives and, in some cases, to create a network of common interest with other groups that work at the same topic. In conclusion, medical writing is one new aspect of scientific and pharmaceutical life that guarantees success of studies, but also could be considered a new profession with specific rules, aims and challenges.