As a copywriter, I love words. Alas, I
am too often tasked with simplifying medical terminology rather than
celebrating it’s complexity. Today, my Dictionary app sent me the
word of the day, scorbutic, an adjective for scurvy. Which led me to
wonder at the plethora (number) of multifarious (diverse) words
physicians must confabulate (discuss). These abstruse (difficult to
understand) words describe conditions both prosaic (common) and
arcane (rare and mysterious).
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
– Silicosis, a lung disease caused by inhalation silica dust. Not
surprisingly, the longest word in the English dictionary is a
medical term
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
– the fear of long words. Pity the poor psychiatrist who has to
not only pronounce this, but code it for reimbursement
Witzelsucht – a set of rare
neurological symptoms characterized by the patient’s uncontrollable
tendency to pun, tell inappropriate jokes and pointless or
irrelevant stories at inconvenient moments. It is associated with
small lesions of the orbitofrontal cortex.
Rhinotillexomania – nose picking
Mittelschmerz – pain that
sometimes occurs with ovulation
Formication – a feeling that
insects or other small creatures are crawling on your skin.
Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia –
an ice-cream headache, or “brain-freeze” in the vernacular
Morsicatio buccarum – the bump
that forms after you bite the inside of your cheek
Borborygmi – a growling stomach
Onychocryptosis – the Greek term
for an ingrown toenail
Sternutate – to sneeze
Horripilation – goose bumps
Gustatory rhinitis – a runny
nose caused by eating spicy food
Veisalgia – a hangover
Sources:
http://forum.thefreedictionary.com
› English › Medicine
Keeping track of sources is essential for writers, particularly when the subject is within a highly regulated industry such as pharmaceuticals. Pharmaceutical copywriters not only have to understand complex information, but they also have the added challenge of supporting every claim. Keeping track of references, and then formatting them, plus annotating is extremely time consuming. Best case scenario is reference tracking interrupts your writing flow. However, losing a reference, or putting the wrong reference in the wrong place can cost you your job. Luckily, there are some great tools for organizing and formatting medical references that will help save your sanity under tight deadlines.
Instant AMA-style referencing and gathering
RefMeis a free extension you can install in Chrome that gathers your references, lets you annotate references, and add notes. So you can organize your sources and format them in one step. When you’re done you can export your list to Word or Open Office, and re-order them to match your manuscript.
If all you need is to quickly format a reference, check citation generator developed by Mick Schroeder, A pharmacy graduate from Penn turned software designer, Schroeder has developed some awesome online tools for us beleaguered pharmaceutical and medical writers. Citation Generator helps you input from a variety of references–including Pubmed, DOI, ISBN, urls– and automatically formats them to AMA style.
Reference Management Software can speed up the referencing process
Reference Managers (RMs) functions include:
Importing citations from bibliographic databases and websites
Gathering metadata from PDF files
Organizing citations within the RM database
Annotating citations
Sharing of the RM database or portions thereof with colleagues
Allowing data interchange with other RM products through standard metadata formats (e.g., RIS, BibTeX)
Producing formatted citations in a variety of styles
Working with word processing software to facilitate in-text citation
Which Reference Management Software is best?
CiteULike, RefWorks, Mendeley, and Zotero are well known reference management tools within the scientific community. In their comparison of four products, Ithaca College librarians Ron Gilmour and Laura Cobus-Kuo found that RefWorks was overall the most robust of these tools.
But don’t expect to get everything with one tool. According to the authors, Not every reference management tool offers all of these features. Neither RefWorks nor CiteULike, can extract data from PDF files. Generally, online-only tools, such as CiteULike, tend to have poorer integration with word processing software than tools that employ a desktop client.
For those of you who want to dig deeper into comparisons of reference managers, check out these links:
As the New Year rolls out, one healthcare campaign really garnered a lot of interest — and that was the ALS ice bucket challenge. It was #6 among the top ten most searched terms of 2014. And ALS received $15.6 million in donations in just a few days, compared with $1.8 million in the prior year. The You Tube video garnered over 3 billion views. This underscores the power of a simple yet novel event idea, well timed: if a celebrity can get publicity by doing something painful yet quick, a charity/cause can gain a lot of attention. In fact, ALS was also one of the most highly searched terms — meaning it was the stunt, rather than the prevalence or seriousness of the illness that correlates to fund-raising.
Overall, however, heart disease and lyme disease were the most searched diseases overall:
This year Harrods gives us a little “tail” of an insignificant mouse, called on Santa to perform a very small task only he can do. He squeezes through a tiny crevice to tighten a light bulb that turns on all the lights decorating Harrods. The message: the smallest jobs can have the greatest impact. It does say a lot about both customer service and employee attitudes. So it’s a booster both for the employees, many of whom are undoubtedly seasonal, and the public. Read more about the shoot
Despite the dehumanizing quality of a war so brutal it was said to end all wars, on Christmas Eve 1914 a truce was called between the Germans and English. For just one night. Peace. If these warriors could find peace for just one night with their enemies, why can’t we 100 years later? At least let us find peace during this season, with our loved ones, friends, neighbors, co-workers, clients…and most importantly, our selves.
