10 Things Writers Should Know About Medical Editing

Feature articles on health topics. Profiles of people with relevant illnesses or injuries. Novels containing medical occurrences. And more.

(Things Writers Should Know.)

Popular writing with medical content abounds. As a medical editor and medical-journalism teacher, I know all too well the errors common in such writing. And as the author of Medical Editing: A Guide to Learning the Craft and Building Your Career, I’m accustomed to showing how to correct such errors.

Of course, it’s better to avoid such errors than for an editor to correct them. So, from the standpoint of a medical editor, here are 10 items for writers to know.

A common error is to confuse the terms psychiatrist and psychologist. Ditto for ophthalmologist and optometrist. In each case, the former is a physician, the latter a nonphysician specialist. Check that individuals and professions are identified accurately. Also, in deciding on content and interviews, realize that not just doctors and nurses take part in health care. A handy guide to healthcare occupations appears in the occupational outlook handbook from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A frequent mistake is to write something like “Dr. Barbara Gastel, MD” or, for a veterinarian, “Dr. Susan Aiello, DVM.” Including both “Dr.” and the abbreviation for the doctoral degree is redundant. Use one or the other. Often, the target publication (or the style manual it uses) will say which convention to follow. Or if you’re self-publishing, choose one convention and stick with it.

Another redundancy is repetition of words already represented in an abbreviation. For example, people sometimes write HIV virus infection.Because HIV stands for “human immunodeficiency virus,” writing virus after HIV is redundant.

Overcapitalization is common in medical writing. For example, I often see sentences such as “Dr. Li, a Pediatrician who completed a fellowship in Rheumatology, often sees patients who have Juvenile Arthritis.” However, terms for medical specialists shouldn’t be capitalized. Ditto for names of fields. And ditto for the names of medical conditions, even though their abbreviations (such as JA for juvenile arthritis) are in all capitals.

Sometimes the name of a medical condition includes the name of a person (and so is called an eponym) or a place (and so is a toponym). In that case, the name of the person or place is capitalized, but the rest of the term is not. Thus, for example, proper form is to write Down syndrome (named after physician John Langdon Down) and Lyme disease (named after Lyme, Connecticut).

Perhaps you’ve noticed that sometimes eponyms appear as possessives (as in Alzheimer’s disease) and sometimes they don’t (as in Alzheimer disease). Different publications follow different conventions in this regard. Medical journals tend to use the non-possessive form, in keeping with American Medical Association style. Some other publications favor the possessive form or use the possessive for some eponyms but not others. It can be worth checking which form the publication (or the style manual that is uses) favors.

Drugs have generic names (official names) and brand names (chosen by the companies marketing them). For example, ibuprofen is a generic name; the corresponding brand names include Advil and Motrin. Generic names aren’t capitalized, but brand names are. Many publications prefer using mainly or solely generic names. However, exceptions exist. For example, if readers might know the brand name but not the generic one, it can make sense to include the brand name on first mention (example: “sildenafil, commonly known as Viagra”). A trustworthy source of easy-to-understand information on drug names and much else is the website MedlinePlus, from the National Institutes of Health.

In writing about medical topics, as elsewhere, try to avoid gender-related and other stereotypes. For instance, avoid wording that assumes that all doctors are male and all nurses are female, or that all older adults are grandparents. The many resources available on minimizing bias in language can aid in this regard.

Typically, use “person first” wording—for example, “people with diabetes” rather than “diabetics”—because the medical condition does not define the people’s identity. However, if a person being written about prefers another designation (for example, “autistic person”), use it. Also, beware of melodramatic language such as “victim” or “suffers from”; normally, use more neutral wording, such as “person with” or “has.” Sources of guidance include the Disability Language Style Guide.

Wording on assistive technologies also bears checking. For example, “is confined to a wheelchair” generally is best recast as “uses a wheelchair,” as wheelchairs tend to liberate rather than confine those with limited mobility.

Avoid interchanging commonly confused terms. Three main offenders:

“Please don’t say I need to check the math,” a medical-editing student once told me. For popular writing about medicine, you’ll rarely need to deal with higher math. But a little statistical savvy is in order. For example: Do the numbers add up? Do the percentages make sense? Do the averages seem reasonable? Also, have an idea what statistical significance refers to.

In lay terms, being statistically significant means that the finding probably wasn’t a fluke. However, statistical significance doesn’t necessarily mean clinical significance; a difference can be real but too small to have medical impact. For an easy-to-understand briefing on statistics, see the chapter “Making Sense of Science Stats” in the KSJ Science Editing Handbook.

Common errors include writing Center for Disease Control (instead of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), National Institute of Health (instead of National Institutes of Health), and John Hopkins University School of Medicine (instead of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine). Check the names of medical institutions you mention.

Also note: Although the first two entities listed above have names plural in form (because they have multiple components), they take singular verbs, as they are single entities. Thus, for example, correct wording is to say, “The National Institutes of Health is based in Bethesda, Maryland.”

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