One Woman's Medicine...

I haven’t had much spare time to blog recently....apart from spending loads of time investigating the October holiday, I’ve also had to complete some assignments from the Slovenian conference workshops (back in May)to achieve accreditation towards a qualification awarded by the European Medical Writers' Association.

Medical writing is a slightly strange profession...it’s not particularly glamorous, but it can be quite rewarding. Sometimes you get to write about new advances in medicine that are really quite exciting and hold the promise of one day putting an end to some of the suffering that illness brings. You also get to see a lot of morbid details...about drugs that don’t work, patients that don’t make it and all about the nasty symptoms and side effects. It’s possible to get quite depressed by this sometimes, but you just have to work through the data and present the evidence.

Some days, I even find humour in things that are not really amusing at all. Recently, I was writing about a study in patients who have suffered a stroke.....the patients were assessed on hospital admission for predicted outcome using a scale of 0 to 6, with 0 being showing no loss of function and 6 being death. How, then, did some patients have a rating of 7? If 6 is death....what is 7....vaporised? Or perhaps reincarnated?

Loads of studies I’ve worked on involve conditions “below the belt”. One, in particular, stands up in my memory....it was for hormone replacement therapy in men with low testosterone levels. Patients frequently complained of “multiple erections” when using the medicine...funny, other men are willing to pay good money for a little blue pill that achieves the same effect.

I also get to read some...er... stimulating articles from very specialised (and highly respectable) medical journals. Who needs ‘Heat’ or ‘Cosmo’, when you could be reading ‘Cough’ or ‘Chest’.... or even ‘Bone’..... and no, I’m not just being "humerus".....