Medical-Writing Is Specialized Documentation

The main reason for this is one, all medical writers who are not doctors or have training in medicine depend on information gleaned from technical documents already written by those in the medical field. They also must rely on help from their SMEs, the medical practitioners, nurses, and researchers.

Then again, this is a very vast and specialized field that not only touches on the domain of doctors , nurses, and researchers who work in hospitals, it also now includes new related areas such as biochemistry, genetics, DNA, and human genome research etc.

Studies suggest that writing medical books for the professional audience, politics plays a greater role than one would think. In this domain publishing is a very competitive thing aka keeping up with the Joneses, after all these are highly educated literate people very interested in medical-writing.

More, doctors who do medical-writing, are a sometimes a very picky bunch tending to create problems with their choice of words, style, sentence structure etc. However, it is the medical editors and ordinary technical communicators that comprise the main sources of problems with politics in this field, because of their relationship with both the doctors and the audience.

Recently, there have been positive efforts by the medical community to collaborate more with non-medical technical communicators. This is a great step forward by this closed self-sustaining society that not since the publication in the 19th-century Canadian self-help “plain language” medical books, has finally decided to change. Doing so allows ordinary folks like us to access and understand the medical language better.

Physician-medical writers have long been used to writing in two distinct styles, one designed for their peers, and the second, addressing the average joe. The former style type, like for example the renowned medical magazine “The Lancet”, was for their peers' reference libraries, whereas the latter was the typical sensational hype magazine just for the average consumers containing some facts and with lots of pictures and “snake oil” advertisements.

Because of continuing technological advances in biochemistry, genetics, stem-cell research, and gene splicing and other promising areas, and the rise of certain trans-mutating viruses and bacterias there is an increasing demand for quick solutions.

Well funded large pharma-biological companies who are staffed with scientists, medical health practitioners, and technicians are exploiting this niche because it is so lucrative and has the potential to be even more.

The health-care market drives the need for getting new and better drugs out as quickly as possible. More drugs and health products makes the need for qualified medical technical communicators even stronger. Documentation that can be read and quickly understood has become paramount.

The bio-pharmaceutical world has long appreciated the need for writers that can churn out concise, and well-structured, written documentation that presents its information clearly. These companies have certainly employed and continue to hire a lot of medical technical writers.

There are primarily two types of medical-writing done for the bio-pharmaceutical companies. The first is called “regulatory” and entails writing documents for government regulatory agencies. This documentation is designed to convince the authorities that the products written about are safe asking their approval to market to consumers.

This documentation is normally very thorough providing all types of clinical study data, patient informed consent forms, reports , and summaries related to developing the medicine or medical device.

The second type of writing is called “educational”and it involves documentation explaining the drugs and devices to various interested audiences. These can include professionals in health-care services as well as the general public.

These documents are usually loaded with many color pictures, graphs and bar charts, personal testimonies, and recommendations from important and or well known personalities in medicine or related fields. They are primarily marketing oriented literature to be used and distributed by the companies' sales force.

Individuals interested in getting into the medical-writing field can get a lot of valuable information about it on the Internet by visiting the STC (Society for Technical Communication) website www.stc.org. This organization is also an excellent source for technical communication and related topics.

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