Medical Communication Project
The Medical Communication Project has ambitious goals. First, we want you to become familiar with (yea, even adept at) searching and using the primary medical literature. This literature is often, but not always, original research. Second, we want for you to feel comfortable participating as a member with expert knowledge...in other words, to feel confident in using the primary literature in writing and in speaking to colleagues.
To that end, you will choose some topic in the medical field to work with for the next several weeks. This topic can cover virtually anything in medicine, though we strongly discourage (and may actually prohibit) topics dealing with ethics. We do this to save you pain: it isn't that these topics are not important. Rather, they are often too deep and complicated to treat intelligently in the 5 weeks or so you have to work on this project, unless you have extensive experience with the topic already (in which case, maybe it's time to try something new). With this exception, you can tackle anything you wish from the biomedical to clinical to sociomedical.
There are two major assignments for the Med Comm Project, the Informative Presentation and the Review paper.
The Informative Presentation
The informative presentation is a 4-6 minutes presentation during which you teach your colleagues about the topic you've chosen.
The Review Paper
This is a brief review paper (see "How and Why Biologists Write") in which you will synthesize and evaluate the current state of knowledge about some disease, condition, or syndrome.
The audience is professional – other medical practitioners.This paper will be 5-7 pages long and consist of three or four parts (there is some flexibility here, but these are the basic four:
- Background/History
- Symptoms
- Diagnosis
- Treatment
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