William Chong

I’m normally very careful in keeping my posts on this site away from work-related affairs. I work with hundreds of confidential documents and with commercially-sensitive information, so it’s generall unwise to blab about my office-time writing endeavours.

However I think it should be OK for me to tell everyone a bit about my current project. Our company’s basically been hired to fix up another agency’s bad work, some of which I’d like to share – for laughs, for serious criticism, and for a general sense of bewilderment.

Bear in mind the copy should be written for a medically-literate audience, and should normally be in a formal, scientific tone.

On the topic of diets:

“People do not have too [sic] eat as much on an organic diet as it contains more (e.g. nutrients) and tastes better.

There are zillions of diets available … Unfortunately, no successful programmeme [sic] for primary prevention has yet been established. …”

On drug adduction:

The brouhaha surrounding addiction is probably anecdotal. As the drug is a CNS stimulant like caffeine, ephedrine and amphetamine then there is the potential for people to become addicted or dependent on that feeling…

On weight loss programmes:

Calorie or point counting and weight loss programmemes [sic] (e.g. Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig) work because they are successful in restricting the calorie intake by providing tools, meals, weekly visits and support in reaching weight loss goals.

These were just a few of the many painful-to-read examples we found. I was also disappointed to also find that of the content that wasn’t purely rank opinion, poor spelling and wild conjecture, there were entire sections that were not-so-subtly plagiarised from published journal articles.

For example, the following paragraph was puzzling because it didn’t seem to be written with the audience (pharmaceutical reps) in mind…

Prevention is the first choice. It has to be our first commitment, particularly to our children and adolescents. Unfortunately, no successful programmeme for primary prevention has yet been established. We have a pervasive culture, reinforced by powerful commercial forces, that promotes eating and physical inactivity. To challenge this established culture will take strong political will and a multidisciplinary approach.

… until I discovered it was word-for-word from the first page of this article.

You could conceivably turn a blind eye to that sort of thing for primary-secondary school essays, but for paid agency work? It was worse than Noelle McCarthy, that’s for sure.

The moral of the story – don’t pay anyone to give you half-baked, plagiarised writing. You might just have to hire someone else to fix it!

In December 2008, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a literature review, by Drs Sarah Bache and Frank Edenborough, of the numerous health problems and injuries associated with making music.

Under the subhead of “Dermatological conditions”, they included references to various conditions such as guitarist’s nipple, cellist’s chest, cello knee and — get this — cello scrotum.

Every cello player is aware that even the most vigorous playing style would still never be able to cause such an awkward injury. Indeed, Elaine Murphy, the senior doctor who first posited the condition in 1974, has ‘fessed up in a subsequent letter to the editor:

Perhaps after 34 years it’s time for us to confess that we invented cello scrotum.

Reading Curtis’s 1974 letter to the BMJ on guitar nipple, we thought it highly likely to be a spoof and decided to go one further by submitting a letter pretending to have noted a similar phenomenon in cellists, signed by the non-doctor one of us (JMM). Anyone who has ever watched a cello being played would realise the physical impossibility of our claim.

I guess this guy will be less worried now!

Looking at two recent studies, the defining dilemma for the old pacemaker-wearing folk that love their iPods would probably be this: “which is more dangerous to me, death metal or draping my headphones across my chest?”

“Headphones interfere with heart devices” was one of the major headlines-grabbing presentations at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2008. In the news release, researchers shared their findings from investigating the effects of mp3 player headphones – most of them contain the magnetic substance neodymium – on the operation of implanted cardiac devices (e.g. pacemakers) and defibrillators.

The researchers found a detectable interference with the device by the headphones in 14 patients, (23 percent). Specifically, they observed that 15 percent of the pacemaker patients and 30 percent of the defibrillator patients had a magnet response, Maisel said.

For patients with pacemakers, exposure to the headphones can force the device to deliver signals to the heart, causing it to beat without regard to the patients’ underlying heart rhythm, he said. Exposure of a defibrillator to the headphones can temporarily deactivate the defibrillator. In most cases, removal of the headphones restores normal device function.

Patients should not focus on the brands we tested but instead should simply be instructed to keep their headphones at least 3 cm from their implantable devices.

Another study presented at the same conference (reported in stuff.co.nz) gave some interesting findings related to cardiovascular function. The authors found that listening to music you like may improve blood flow. 10 healthy non-smoking men and women had ultrasound tests to examine blood vessel function while listening either to music that made them feel happy, or music that made them anxious.

Compared to normal baseline measurements, blood vessel diameter increased 26 percent on average when the volunteers heard their joyful music. Interestingly (though hardly statistically significant), most of the volunteers chose country music as joyful(!). Listening to music they disliked narrowed blood vessels by 6 percent (most of them chose heavy metal).

I guess now we can add good music (together with statins, ACE inhibitors, dark chocolate, laughter and other undiscovered finer-things) to the list of effective vasodilators. And smooth blood flow leads to less of the blood clots that cause heart attacks and strokes. Who knew listening to the Dixie Chicks could be�good for your heart?

NZ freelance health writer Noel O’Hare recently wrote about a weight-loss study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2008. In his stuff.co.nz opinion piece, O’Hare, who reads as a vocal supporter of the Atkins method of low-carb dieting, champions the Israeli study as strong evidence that a low-carb diet is superior to a low-fat diet.

Before everyone starts jumping on the worship Dr Atkins bandwagon, I’d just like to point out a passage in the methods section from the article itself, which outlines what the low-carb diet actually was:

Low-Carbohydrate Diet

The low-carbohydrate, non restricted-calorie diet aimed to provide 20 g of carbohydrates per day for the 2-month induction phase and immediately after religious holidays, with a gradual increase to a maximum of 120 g per day to maintain the weight loss. The intakes of total calories, protein, and fat were not limited. However, the participants were counseled to choose vegetarian sources of fat and protein and to avoid trans fat. The diet was based on the Atkins diet (see Supplementary Appendix 2).

So here are a few points that I thought up:

1) The total caloric intake wasn’t regulated (in the other two diets, it was at 1500kcal/day for women and 1800kcal/day for men). Fair fight? Perhaps the low-carb group were consuming fewer calories than the other two groups and therefore lost more weight.
2) Is it really a genuine Atkin’s diet if participants were “counseled to choose vegetarian sources of fat and protein and to avoid trans fat”? When I think Atkins, I think steaks. Lots. of. steaks. mmmm.
3) The fine print at the bottom of the article has this to say: “Supported by the Nuclear Research Center Negev (NRCN), the Dr. Robert C. and Veronica Atkins Research Foundation, and the S. Daniel Abraham International Center for Health and Nutrition, Ben-Gurion University, Israel.” Other than the fact that this blogging correspondent sounds like he could be working for the Atkins Foundation, this study seems to be receiving direct support from the Atkins Foundation. Bias, anyone?

I could say more, but I think it’s probably a good idea to read the NEJM study carefully – “Think before you swallow”. And I guess that goes for anything that we’re asked to believe, in any context.