Last week I spent a fascinating day in Oxford at the MedComms Strategic Forum 2010. It was a varied day, in which many aspects of medical communications were discussed. Apart from the ever-welcome opportunity to catch up with old friends, make some new ones, and also to be able to put faces to names I had previously only known in places like Twitter, I took part in some thought provoking exchanges of ideas about how the role of medical communications … Continue reading →

It is widely believed in the medical writing community that professional medical writers write better papers than people who are not professional medical writers. It seems a logical proposition, doesn’t it? After all, it’s generally accepted that brain surgeons are better at doing brain surgery than people who are not brain surgeons, that airline pilots are better at flying planes than people who are not airline pilots, and that bankers are better at running banks than people who are not … Continue reading →

Yesterday I wrote about a recent paper in Annals of Internal Medicine, comparing publications funded by the pharmaceutical industry with those from different funding sources. The main focus of that post was on the reasons why industry publications were more likely to report favourable results. Today I’d like to write a bit more about the other finding of that study, which appeared in the conclusions of the paper’s abstract (actually before the conclusion relating to the primary outcome, which is … Continue reading →

An interesting paper, by Florence Bourgeois and colleagues, was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last week (sadly behind a paywall, but the abstract is available here). The paper looked at outcomes of trials registered on clinicaltrials.gov, and compared those funded by the pharmaceutical industry with those funded by other sources. The results make interesting reading. Their primary objective was to look at whether source of funding was associated with favourable published outcomes. Not surprisingly, it was: this paper … Continue reading →