Writing, Reading, and Understanding in Modern Health Sciences: Medical Articles and Other Forms of Communication PDF

Introduction

Articles in all health sciences, colloquially called medical articles, have always been an essential vehicle of information about the lived experience of a health professional, his or her research, and desire to improve one's work to the best benefit of the patient and the community. Medical articles were typically a purely descriptive, mostly clinical experience. However, medical articles have evolved over time.

Today information in a medical article must address not only research activities and findings, but also strategic, managerial, and administrative ones, and planning, political, cultural, spiritual, and other social aspects and lived experience in healthcare, health protection, disease prevention, and health promotion. Thus, the content and form of health communication likewise must diversify and expand accordingly. The purpose of this book is to help the authors of medical articles—and their readers—communicate better using medical articles in today's practice and health research environment and fulfill vital communication demands for health information.

We expect a medical article to be a good communication tool, useful in knowledge translation, and produce best evidence that will contribute to further practice and research innovations. To succeed, articles must have a proper form and content. Most writing guides that are currently available focus mainly on the form, structure, and organization of medical articles. These structural aspects are well established, but, what about the content?

In this book, we will explore the most effective practices for communicating using three main medical literature formats: scientific articles, articles where the subject is not based on the practice of the scientific method, and business reports. Readers must build a critical appraisal system of these communication tools to be able to effectively read and assess them for their scientific quality and relevance to inform decision making and ultimately to use in the readers' subsequent clinical and other practice.

A medical article may be written and read in several ways: as a valid exercise in informal logic, critical thinking, and argumentation to convince the reader while describing health events, and discovering causal relationships between noxious and beneficial factors and their corresponding impact on health. Most often, information must be available across the conventional IMRAD (introduction → material and methods → results, and → discussion and conclusions → references) format. Using this structure, only selected book topics should guide meaningful message development: the Introduction that includes a seven-part research thesis; the challenge of definitions in the Material and Methods sections; causal reasoning behind the Results and Discussion sections structure and content; and modern argumentation and critical thinking that underly particularly the Discussion and Conclusions of an article. Clinical case reporting also merits special attention given the expanding spectrum of expectations and ensuing methodology placed upon this medical literature genre. Medical articles are necessarily subject as well to editorial and publication ethics.