Helpful hints from work – #18

(This is the latest in a series of tips I write for work. My boss wrote a few tips for the company blog at the start of the year, so the delay between tips 17 and 18 here is from waiting my turn to come up with and share new material.)

Today’s tip: confusion with “lead”

English can be confusing when words have different pronunciations for the same spelling. Today’s example looks at “lead.”

Lead (sounds like led) = a noun meaning the element that is found in pencils and can be harmful in certain substances.

Example: “Happy Fun Metallic Bear was recently recalled after consumer safety groups found that the toy had high levels of lead.”

To lead (sounds like leed) = a verb meaning to guide something or direct operations.

Present tense: “Bob, lead Milton to my office. I need to tell him that if he could move his desk to the basement, that’d be great.”

The past tense of “to lead” is “led.”

Past tense: “After they led him to the basement, Milton threatened to burn down the building, but no one heard because he was mumbling.”

You be the editor: an ethical dilemma

Being an editor requires using good ethics in addition to correct grammar — we’re taught to attribute statements to their rightful owners, not to plagiarize, etc. Given this situation, what would you do?

An employee who has been thrown into producing PR pieces, but who doesn’t have a strong writing background, turns in a press release about a recent charity event the company sponsored. In addition to numerous grammatical errors and factual errors, a check of the charity’s Web site shows that paragraphs from the release are lifted straight from the homepage. This isn’t the first time this writer has made major mistakes, and this person doesn’t like to admit to being wrong. The piece is on deadline set to go to the CEO next in the route. What do you do to address what looks like plagiarism?

a) Take the piece back to the writer and find out what happened.
b) Write down your concerns, but pass along the piece so the higher-ups can see the writer’s work and be aware of potential problems.
c) Other (let me know your solution)

Rise of radiation therapy brings hope, but also hurt

This two-part story presents a chilling picture of how medicine that is intended to heal can actually cause harm. For “The Radiation Boom” series The New York Times examined public and private records and interviewed healthcare professionals, researchers, and regulators to get an idea of how radiation treatment is growing in popularity and technology but regulations remain lax, sometimes causing fatal errors to occur. Frighteningly, there is no single agency overseeing medical radiation, and some states do not require radiotherapy accidents to be reported at all. “My suspicion is that maybe half of the accidents we don’t know about,” the article reported Dr. Fred A. Mettler Jr. saying.

Part 1 gives background about the rise of radiation and presents case studies of people who suffered fatal dosage mistakes: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/health/24radiation.html?ref=health

Part 2 explains how technological advancements are coming so fast that the industry can’t seem to keep up. Most procedures see a person setting a computer program to calibrate radiation, but many technical problems can occur. “The problem, Dr. [Howard I.] Amols [chief of clinical physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center] said, is that computers are better at checking humans than humans are at checking computers. ‘The responsibility on Day 1 to make everything right is much more important than it used to be,’ he said. ‘We are still grappling with how we do that.’”: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/us/27radiation.html?pagewanted=1&ref=health

Check out doctor’s book on the importance of checklists

Could something as simple as a checklist help reduce medical mistakes? Surgeon and author Atul Gawande thinks so, as he explains in this interview with Time Magazine. His new book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, discusses the impact of such tools, and he has observed a big impact — the interview notes that when Dr. Gawande’s research team introduced a checklist in eight hospitals in 2008, major surgery complications dropped 36% and deaths went down by 47%. The story makes me interested to check out the book, especially after seeing how Dr. Gawande explains medical issues in terms anyone could understand. This is my favorite quote, about how building a surgical team is not just about picking the best specialists: “One thing that has struck me is that we are building medicine as a series of pieces. It’s like building a car without understanding it’s a system. We concentrate on getting the very best people and the best technologies, in the same way you might put a car together by saying, Hey, let’s takes the brakes of a Ferrari and the chassis of a BMW and the body of a Volvo. When you put it together, you just get a pile of junk that’s very expensive and doesn’t work very well.”

Find the full interview here: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1950892,00.html

Making stories and pictures work together (or, wildflowers = sharks?)

Editors need to focus on the words of a piece, but clients also rely on us to see the big picture. Often times that means literally thinking about pictures — how they relate to a story, whether they are appropriate, etc.

This funny link that I randomly stumbled on really threw me for a loop. It’s a very interesting article about shark attacks, but seeing that as the headline coupled with a photo of wildflowers was a huge disconnect. Yes, it’s reporting on a paper presented at a summer Colorado conference, where they might have been wildflowers, but “shark” and “flower” together seems so incongruent that it distracts from the real meaning of the piece (shark attacks still happen; here are strategies for attack prevention). Check out the screenshot below or go here for the full article (which is still worth reading): http://www.healthline.com/blogs/outdoor_health/2009/10/shark-attack-review.html

An example of the disconnect that can happen when photos and text don't work in harmony.

Surviving malaria and amputation, gaining a new purpose

This story, originally published near Thanksgiving, will definitely make you feel thankful for good health. The two-part series follows a woman in Chicago, Dawn Dubsky, who lost all four limbs after catching malaria on a trip to Africa. The articles are great examples of medical journalism — the writer deftly balances telling the human interest part of the story and giving technical (but easy-to-understand) details about how malarial parasites attack and destroy the body.

Part 1: http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-malaria-part-one-26-nov26,0,4063348.story?page=1 The photos and video accompanying both parts are definitely worth looking at.

Part 2: http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-malaria-part-twonov27,0,1675381.story The Tribune story has amazing quotes that show what happened when Dawn woke up from surgery but hadn’t yet realized what had happened (she had been in such critical condition that her family had to make the about amputation): “My fingers are freezing,” she told her father one day. “Hold my hand.” After a moment’s hesitation, Tom Dubsky responded: “Dawn, you don’t have a hand. I’ll hold your arm.”

Newspaper series explores sham autism claims

The Chicago Tribune has done some amazing investigative journalism in 2009 about autism treatments, especially ones that might be shams. I eagerly read their first story in May (about treating autism with a chemical castration drug) but didn’t remember to post it here. Recently the reporter did a similar piece emphasizing the many ways that research can be used to support any treatment, even one that the original authors didn’t support.

November story, “Science hijacked to support alternative therapies”: In this story, researchers who found evidence of neuroinflammation during autopsies of autistic brains feared that people might jump to conclusions using their research and push anti-inflammatory drugs before a real connection could be proven. They made sure to write a disclaimer to go with their 2005 journal article, but their work was still taken out of context. One Florida doctor wrote a paper using the original report to recommend treating autism with powerful immune-modifying drugs (specifically intravenous immunoglobulin). However, that report’s primer had specifically emphasized that IVIG “WOULD NOT HAVE a significant effect” on the findings in the brains of people with autism. Others promoting hyperbaric oxygen treatment have also miscited the 2005 paper. The article says one such doctor admits that he “has not done studies to show his protocols work and are safe. He said he doesn’t have time to wait for science to validate the results he and parents see.” It’s frightening to see that some people wouldn’t just “hijack” science to support what they want – they’d ignore it entirely if it didn’t match the image they wanted to convey. http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-autism-science-nov23,0,240420.story

The original May story, “‘Miracle drug’ called junk science”: This story mentions how two doctors have been promoting Lupron as a cure for autism. The drug is sometimes used to chemically castrate sex offenders, but these doctors promote its use based on the theory that children with autism have too much mercury in their blood, combined with excess testosterone (which Lupron decreases). Many doctors call the theory medically baseless. As Simon Baron-Cohen, a psychopathology professor and director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge, told reporters, “The idea of using it with vulnerable children with autism, who do not have a life-threatening disease and pose no danger to anyone, without a careful trial to determine the unwanted side effects or indeed any benefits, fills me with horror.” I appreciate that the article shows both sides of the issue, such as interviewing parents who feel their children have been helped by Lupron. What really concerns me is one doctor’s seemingly cavalier attitude toward possible long-term effects from the drug. In treating a teen boy, the doctor said he was just concerned with current improvements – “I wasn’t worried about whether he would have children when he is 25 years old.” http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-autism-lupron-may21,0,242705.story

Autism is such a controversial and complex topic, so it’s great to see in-depth pieces that analyze the validity of newer treatment claims. I’m interested to hear if anyone else has seen good research into the topic lately. Let me know!

Pharma ads get recognized (sort of)

I came across this Slate article recently and found it really interesting: http://www.slate.com/id/2235770/.

The writer seems so surprised to note that “yes, they give awards for pharmaceutical ads.” To which I say, “Of course they do!” The walls of my agency are full of them. Then again, it’s not common knowledge. I’d never known about them before coming to the industry, but there are almost more than you can count: the IN-AWE awards, the Globals, the RX Club Awards, Diagnostic Marketing Awards (DxMA), and the list goes on. The article is correct that this is the first year the Clios have had a separate show just for us. I remember seeing the press release in the summer and mentioning it to my agency (although we didn’t enter). I was at the regular Clios in 2004 as a guest and really enjoyed seeing great ideas being recognized. I think I’d appreciate it even more now after knowing first hand the hard work that goes into making all kinds of ads!

Also related to ads, this Business Week piece (mentioned in the awards article), explains how hard it is for pharmaceutical ads to capture attention when they have to conform to strict regulations and “ask your doctor” rules. In fact, the required listing of side effects and warnings could even be scaring off patients, who often remember a drug’s bad features even more than the brand name: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_46/b4155078964719.htm?campaign_id=yhoo

Helpful hints from work – #17

(The latest in a series of tips from work.)

This week’s tip: lets vs let’s

“Lets” is a verb form of “to let,” meaning to allow or permit.

“Let’s” is a contraction of “let us.”

- The new Yellow Diet lets you eat anything you want, as long as it’s yellow. Tonight for dinner I’m having Funyuns and Twinkies!

- Andy’s mother only lets him watch TV after his homework is finished.

- Let’s go to the movies this weekend. I want to see the sappy one that’s up for an Oscar. (Let us go to the movies.)

- He grumbled, ”Let’s hope the baseball game doesn’t get rained out again tomorrow.” (Let us hope.)

Cat gets swine flu, writers get clever

Last week a house cat in Iowa became the first case of a pet with swine flu. It got a good amount of national news coverage, but what caught me was how different outlets spun the story.

The New York Times had a straightforward take: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/the-cat-who-got-swine-flu/

Time.com tried a funny approach, with a photo of a cat in a flu mask and a silly headline. It’s a great cultural reference (the LOLcat phenomenon of icanhascheezburger.com), but it seemed a bit too light for a medical topic like this. I guess it shows how popular culture is shaping even supposedly serious news coverage:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1934826,00.html

What do you think?