On Medical Writing and Publishing
Improving your Medical Writing Skills
There is no formal degree or certification course in medical writing. You have to look elsewhere to improve your skills. Here are some avenues people generally take to learn this essential skill:
In-house training. Organisations that employ medical writers usually provide the required general and project-specific training courses to new recruits, such as training in drug development communications, exposure to drug safety guidelines, style guides, and statistics courses, to name but a few.
Short workshops. Mostly set up by professional organisations, these in-depth workshops typically last just one or two days and focus on specific topics like clinical study reports, protocol writing, as well as conference updates. They are effective, but can be pricey!
“Mentor-guided” training. This type of training is usually offered to inexperienced writers by a senior medical writer with more expertise in writing different documents, normally highly focused on the specific document types the organisation handles.
Motivated “self-study”. This is the first milestone of any career in medical writing. A writer who is curious and motivated can accomplish great achievements just by training themselves in one or more different medical writing types and domains.
Express Translations
For any number of reasons, we all find ourselves working to a very tight deadline or struggling with last-minute urgent jobs at some point in our career… But it’s no problem for Cremer Consulting!
During the more than 10 years Cremer Consulting SARL has been in this business, it has built up solid experience in the field of general scientific translation, particularly in the medical field. Not only does this experience give us an edge, but our ability to produce high-quality work in just such tight deadlines sets us apart from other agencies!
You may have just a 48- or even 1-hour turnaround, depending on the size of the job, yet we will deliver as quickly as we can while still always ensuring the other fundamental pillar of our company values: good quality.
Don’t hesitate in placing your trust in us for urgent work. Send us your documents as soon as you can and we will do our utmost to meet your requirements and demonstrate our great know-how.
Writing an Article on Phytotherapy
Writing an article on the medicinal properties of plants is not as easy as it may seem. In western society, the literature is above all focused on synthesized drugs, while researchers who study Mother Nature’s remedies are sometimes treated as hippies. Here are some tips on how to tread this fine line.
1) Focus on one of the plant’s principal properties. Before you start writing or even researching in detail, consider what this principal property is. There is no need to try to describe all of a plant’s benefits; in fact this could actually confuse your reader: there is no miracle product that can cure everything.
2) Restrict yourself to a few reliable sources. Don’t waste your time consulting a multitude of websites that may not be wholly trustworthy. Instead, choose two or three high-quality sources, for example widely-recognized websites or paper-format journals. The information you will glean from them will help guide your plan.
3) Get stuck in! You now have all the elements you need: a few reliable sources, carefully-selected information, and an essay plan. Don’t forget, either, that you are writing for the general public, so keep your sentences short and make your writing snappy and engaging…
Working with Professor Soubrier: a Source of great Pride
Our fruitful collaboration with Professor Martin Soubrier of Gabriel Montpied Hospital, Clermont-Ferrand, France, goes back several years now, involving translating scientific papers into English, editing manuscripts, and adapting publications to journal instructions.
Biomarker research
Prof. Martin Soubrier, an international pioneer in rheumatoid disease research, is particularly interested in the biological markers of rheumatoid arthritis and how they can help evaluate and follow-up patients in routine clinical practice. Using this technology, clinicians and researchers aim to identify specific biological markers, hopefully enabling them to predict individual patient responses to targeted therapies.
The further this technology advances, the greater the potential for developing individualized treatment approaches that specifically target each patient’s disease while avoiding damaging other tissues and organs. Given its possible future benefits, this is a real opportunity for rheumatoid patients worldwide.
Several papers published in 2017
The latest of our successful collaborations was the publication of one of the papers edited by our linguistic team in 2017, and you can consult the abstract at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29089118