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

Cool drug words (HIV/virology edition)

My agency works with a company that manufactures tests to determine if a patient’s strain of HIV will be susceptible to certain drugs (antivirals). The drug names mentioned in those virology and diagnostic pieces are huge tongue twisters! I appreciate that so many have underused letters like v and z. The notations in parentheses are the drug abbreviations (which sometimes don’t seem to match the full name at all!).

atazanavir
maraviroc (MVC)
efavirenz (EFV)
emtricitabine (FTC)
nelfinavir
nevirapine
ritonavir
saquinavir/r
darunavir/r
tenofovir
zidovudine (AZT)
zidovudine and lamivudine (CBV)
lopinavir/ritonavir (LPV/RTV)
stavudine (D4T)
lamivudine (3TC)
azidothymidine/abacavir sulfate/lamivudine (AZT/ABC/3TC)
abacavir sulfate/tenofovir disoproxil fumarate/didanosine (ABC/TDF/ddl)
fosamprenavir/ritonavir

Weird ingredient names

Health columnists and nutritionists often urge people not to eat foods with ingredients they can’t pronounce. If the same rule applied to medications, we’d be out of luck! Just look at the doozy of a list from our client’s medical device cream for seborrheic dermatitis (and this is just a partial selection — there are other odd-sounding compounds in the mix!).

- isohexadecane
- butyrospermum parkii
- ethylhexyl palmitate
- PEG-30 dipolyhydroxystearate
- bisabolol
- ascorbyl tetraisopalmitate
- glycyrrhetinic acid

Cool dermatology words

My ad agency works on a lot of dermatology products (for acne, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis, etc), and many of the words from those pieces caught my eye for theirweird spellings or pronunciations. Some of my favorites:

desquamation – The peeling off of skin in the form of scales.

Propionibacterium acnes – A bacterium that can block pores and lead to acne.

seborrheic dermatitis – A red, scaly, itchy dermatitis (skin condition) chiefly affecting areas, such as the face, scalp, or chest, with many large sebaceous (oil) glands.

Malassezia furfur – A yeast naturally found on the skin’s surface that can overgrow and cause infections that result in dandruff, seborrheic dermatitis, or certain skin rashes.

keratolytic – Related to the process of breaking down or dissolving keratin.

adapalene, tazarotene, and isotretinoin – Topical retinoids (chemical compounds related to vitamin A) used for the treatment of skin conditions.

allergenicity – The quality of being able to induce allergies or an allergic reaction.

Favorite medical and editing blogs

I have yet to figure out how to add a listing of my favorite blogs to this page, so for the time being, here’s a post about them instead! (If anyone wants to give me WordPress blogroll tips, that’d be much appreciated.)

Medical News: (All of these blogs are great places to find up-to-date health articles with a personal spin.)
Well Blog: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/
Triage: http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/triage/
Julie’s Health Club: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/features_julieshealthclub/

Journalism and Editing:
Rough Draft: http://www.gjsentinel.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/communities/roughdraft/index.html (This is a blog by a columnist at my old hometown newspaper. It seems to alternate between observations from the newsroom and posts about managing errors.)
The Copy Editor Says: thecopyeditorsays.wordpress.com (A friend who’s a copy editor and designer in Houston blogs about life both in and out of the newsroom. She has my blog linked from hers!)
Words to the Wise: http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/lifestyle/language.html (A blog about language and editing by an editor I knew in Milwaukee who also attended Medill.)
Regret the Error: http://www.regrettheerror.com/ (A recent discovery that posts funny corrections from major newspapers.)

Grammar and Usage:
GrammarBlog: http://www.grammarblog.co.uk/ (A blog with commentary on funny or bad grammatical situations.)
NYTimes After the Deadline: http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/after-deadline/ (A blog that examines grammar, usages, and style at the New York Times. Articles come accompanied with examples of real mistakes from the paper’s pages.)
The NYTimes grammar index page, which also links to other blogs: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/e/english_language/grammar/index.html

Punctuation:
Apostrophe Abuse: http://www.apostropheabuse.com/ (A blog whose title perfectly conveys what it is. Great photos and commentary on horribly misused apostrophes, which are a huge pet peeve of mine.)
The “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks: http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/ (This blog is similar to Apostrophe Abuse but focuses on overused quotation marks instead.)

2009 means no more Prozac pens

I fell behind with posting in December but am back to kick off January with a story about new rules affecting drug companies (and the firms that advertise for them!) in 2009.

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) has created new guidelines that bar drug companies from giving doctors trinkets that have nothing to do with education (pens, calendars, calculators, etc) or from spending money more to entice them than to give real information (such as fancy dinners and resort getaways). Narrowing the types of promotions companies can use is supposed to keep physicians from being influenced, even subtly, by such marketing. It’s something that affects the pharmaceutical advertising industry, too, because we have to help those drug companies, as our clients, plan branding that falls within these guidelines. Here’s a great overview from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/business/31drug.html?ref=health

This story also hits home because as a psychiatrist’s kid, our house was always full of Prozac pens,  Zoloft post-its, Geodon clocks, and a whole host of other products (at one point we got a model of a brain with snap-apart regions). Although I agree that limiting random plastic junk is a smart idea, part of me wonders if doctors will miss it. Here’s a fun blog (cited in the above article) that highlights great freebies of the past that wouldn’t pass muster under the new rules: http://drugreptoys.blogspot.com/

How do extended-release drugs work?

Here’s a neat explanation of how drugs that are taken once a week, once a month, or even just once a year can still be effective. I always appreciate the Q&A columns in the NYTimes health section — they seem to be informative but not too convoluted or technical.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/health/02qna.html?ref=health

(It’s been a bit since I posted, and I know this one is short, but we’ve been crazy busy at work. The ad agency’s trying to finish projects before the end of the year so we can bill clients for 2008, so it’s meant lots of jam-packed days and late nights. I’m looking forward to days off for the holiday, and hopefully I can add my backlog of posting ideas then!)

Cool condition names

Here are some medical conditions that have neat-sounding names. The first 4 actually come up often at work, usually in the prescribing information or safety information for products we advertise. (Note: It’s easier to do fake phonetic pronunciations than to try to match the exact special characters given with the Merriam Webster medical definitions–I have no idea how to make the upside down e! First stress is italic; main stress is underlined.)

bradycardia (bray-dih-card-ee-uh) – Relatively slow heart action (heartbeat).

tacycardia (tack-ih-card-ee-uh) – Relatively rapid heart action (opposite of bradycardia).

diverticulitis (dye-ver-tick-u-lite-us) – Inflammation or infection of a diverticulum (an abnormal pouch or sac opening) of the colon.

arthralgia (ar-thral-juh) – Pain in one or more joints.

mutagenicity (myoo-tuh-gen-nih-sit-ee) – The capacity to induce mutations.

glomerulonephritis (gluh-mair-yu-lo-neh-fryt-iss) – Nephritis (acute or chronic inflammation of the kidney) marked by inflammation of the capillaries of the renal glomeruli.

onchocerciasis (on-ko-sur-ky-uh-sis) – A disease that is marked by subcutaneous nodules, dermatitis, and visual impairment and is caused by a worm (Onchocerca volvulus) that is found in Africa and tropical America and transmitted by the bite of a female blackfly. Also called also onchocercosis or river blindness.

Helpful hints from work – Week 7

(The latest in a series of tip e-mails I send to writers at work.)

Today: affect vs effect

- Easy way to remember: “affect” is the verb and “effect” is the noun.
Wrong: This winter weather will effect my commute. [It will affect the commute.]
Wrong: What kind of affect will snow have on my travel plans? [The snow will have an effect.]
Right: Her bus route was affected by bad roads, making her late to work.
Right twice: She said winter’s ill effects didn’t affect her plans to move to Chicago. She liked the city despite the slush and sleet.

I had wanted to note in the e-mail that there are exceptions to the affect=verb/effect=noun rule, but my managing editor thought we should keep it simple. However, here are those other uses:

- “affect” is very rarely used as a noun to mean feeling or disposition (in a medical sense): “The psychiatric patient presented with flat affect.”

- “effect” can be a verb when used to mean bringing about changes, usually in a political sense: “The city council vowed to effect change in its new term.”

When medical Web searches lead to cyberchondria

Do simple Web searches leave you convinced you’ve got the scariest, rarest disease imaginable? Maybe you have cyberchondria, or hypochondria driven by the ability to search medical conditions on the Web. Microsoft published a study about it recently, which I found out about from a New York Times article today. As the researchers explain, the problem is that common sense might tell people that what comes up first in the search results would be the most likely diagnosis. But then what happens to your anxiety level if you type in “headache” and the top-ranked (first) Web search result is “brain tumor”? The researchers note that they hope to create better search engines that could detect medical queries and would offer results that weren’t so alarmist. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/25/technology/internet/25symptoms.html?ref=health

“We use the term cyberchondria to refer to the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web.” (Microsoft Research link to the study results, available as a PDF): http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?type=Technical%20Report&id=1595