Job applications

We get a lot of speculative job applications at Dianthus from people who want to be medical writers. I am always amazed how much the quality of those applications varies. Sometimes we get excellent ones, and we have been known to recruit medical writers that way.

Today, however, I received one in which the subject line of the email was "mdical writing position". Needless to say, we won't be offering the sender a job.

Everything is crap

I don't think I'm paranoid, but sometimes I feel everyone really is out to get me. Why is it so hard to get products and services that just work and do what they are supposed to do? Some examples:

Ikea. I won't say any more for now about my own recent experience while it's still with the lawyers, but watch this space for all the details in due course. I'm sure you know what they're like anyway.

Come and see us in Nice

We will be exhibiting at the DIA Clinical Forum in Nice on 19-21 October. Please come and see us on stand 34 if you're going to be at the conference.

How do we find our clients?

People often ask me how Dianthus Medical finds its clients. Truth is, we find clients through various different ways, but I just want to write here about one way in which we definitely don't find our clients.

I've been getting a lot of phone calls recently from people who claim that they are representing senior executives in pharmaceutical companies and have been given the task of finding medical writing, clinical data management, or statistics providers. All I have to do to meet these people who are so eager to use our services is to turn up to a meeting, organised by the person calling me, and pay them a big fat juicy fee.

Interesting new cancer research

There's an interesting story in the news today about some recent cancer research. The research, published in Cell, describes investigation of the ability of various molecules to kill cancer stem cells, and comes up with a promising candidate drug for future research, salinomycin.

Oral cancer statistics

Today's news on the latest oral cancer statistics contains some schoolboy errors in presenting statistical results, and are a great example of how not to present statistics in the popular media.

Let's take the title of the article to start with:  "Drink blamed for oral cancer rise". Well, it's true that oral cancer is more common now than it was in previous decades. It's also true that we drink more now than in previous decades. And it's true that alcohol consumption is a risk factor for oral cancer. So it seems logical to assume that drink must be responsible, doesn't it?

How not to do customer service

When I set up Dianthus Medical 10 years ago, I have to confess that the idea of setting up a business was a little scary. One of the things that gave me the courage to go ahead anyway was the observation that so many companies seemed to be incredibly badly run, and yet still survived, so how hard could it be?

The EMWA and AMWA ghostwriting survey

I am pleased to report that a little piece of research I've done, together with my co-author Cindy Hamilton (current president of AMWA), has recently been published in The Write Stuff, the journal of EMWA.

Dentists need medical writers too

I have just returned from a trip to the dentist, where I was reminded how important the medical writer's craft is in all branches of healthcare. Medical writers are skilled in making sure that text is clear and unambiguous, and if my dentist's practice had had the benefit of a medical writer, their health questionnaire might have looked different.

A sad day for British politics

Yesterday's European election results were, on one level, a lot of fun. Our useless waste-of-space government, led by the incompetent Gordon Brown, suffered one of their worst election defeats ever. That's a good thing, although sadly our government is so out of touch with reality they will no doubt ignore the huge message that the British electorate have just sent them and  continue to lurch from crisis to crisis until we finally have the opportunity to get rid of them at the next general election in about a year's time.