Medical Conference Blog

The Carbon Footprint of Medical Conferences

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:19:00 +0000

There's been another kerfluffle in the British Medical Journal about whether medical conferences are worth their environmental cost.

In the June 28, 2008 issue of the BMJ, Dr. Malcolm Green, professor emeritus of respiratory medicine at Imperial College, London, argues that international medical conferences are a luxury the world can no longer afford. He quotes calculations indicating that the annual meeting of the American Thoracic Society, which attracts 15,000 attendees, is responsible for 100 million person-air-miles of travel and 10,800 tonnes of carbon emissions. And he says that the "American Cardiac Society" attracts 45,000 attendees, who travel 300 million person-air-miles.

(We'll be kind to Dr. Green and the BMJ's copy editors and pass over the fact that there is no American Cardiac Society. I'm guessing he meant the American Heart Association.)

"If there are, say, 20 medical conferences a year in the US," Dr. Green writes, "and we add in conferences in Europe, Asia, and Australasia, the impact from travel toconferences would be at least 6 billion person air miles a year or 600,000 tonnes of carbon."

Wow, are there really only 20 medical conferences a year in the US? I cover that many all by myself, and I go to only a tiny minority of them. He's off by at least an order of magnitude, and probably by a factor of 50 or more if you include medical conferences outside the US. His main argument--that medical conferences could more easily and more economically be conducted virtually, online, via teleconferences--would be more persuasive if he didn't make those simple errors of fact.

His opponent in the BMJ's "Head to Head" debate is hardly more persuasive. Dr. James Owen Drife, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Leeds General Infirmary, argues that nothing can substitute for face-to-face contact, and that anyway medical conferences only have a minuscule effect on global warming.

I'm surprised that the BMJ would publish such a poorly argued debate. Neither debater did more than wave his hands to support his argument that virtual conferences would (Dr. Green) or would not (Dr. Drife) be an adequate substitute for face-to-face meetings. I would have been happier if either one of them pointed to a single well-done study--hell, even a single lousy study--that demonstrated the value, or the lack of value, of face-to-face scientific meetings. Their arguments are even short of anecdotal evidence!

One thing is for certain. There would be dire consequences for medical journalists if virtual medical conferences became popular.

1. We'd no longer be able to wheedle subsidized travel to Detroit, Mich., Anaheim, Calif., Orlando, Fla., and other exotic vacation destinations.

2. We'd lose out on the romance of modern air travel, the luxurious amenities in airports, and the tender loving care of flight attendants.

3. We'd have to purchase our own pens and post-it pads.

4. No more free stale coffee, pasta salad, and rubber chicken in meeting press rooms.

5. We'd have even less reason ever to move away from our desks, and our profession would be afflicted with an ever worsening epidemic of writer's ass.

It's Not Just the ADA: EULAR, a Rant

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 21:10:00 +0000

In my previous post I took the American Diabetes Association to task for failing to allow reporters to photograph or record any sessions. Despite my invitation to do so, Collen Fogarty and Diane Tuncer of the ADA have declined to offer any explanation for these restrictive policies.

Unfortunately the ADA is not alone in these restrictions. Today I heard from a noted medical journalist (who prefers to remain anonymous) who had a similar experience at the recent EULAR (European League Against Rheumatism) meeting in Paris. The journalist wrote:

Roueche,

I read your rant RE: ADA prohibitions with much interest and similar feelings of frustration. I have just returned from EULAR where similar restrictions are imposed. They are also strictly enforced (one of my colleagues who was taking photographs was physically ejected from the conference when he refused to turn over his camera).

I use audio recordings and photographs of slides as a form of note taking for the exact reasons you expressed: I cannot efficiently collect the data I need any other way. The articles I write contain real clinical information including p values, CI, HR, etc. They are researched and referenced and I work with the presenters (during and post conference) to ensure that I "got it right". At EULAR I initially opted to ignore the rules until asked to stop. When this happened (and it didn't take long), I asked why photography and recording were prohibited. The security guard (a real, headset wearing, burly, somewhat intimidating security guard not a student hired just to watch the audience) responded "We have our orders." When I took my inquiry to the EULAR committee I was given several reasons including "copyright" (?). One of the more interesting responses was "this is sensitive information that some presenters do not want released." I won’t say more about either of these response – they just don’t deserve to be commented on. When I countered that as a credentialed (invited) member of the press I needed the information to accurately report what was presented and that this was a form of note taking, I was informed "If I let you do it then everyone will want to do it."

From what I could tell - 75-80% of this conference was being videotaped by an outside service. When I asked one of the employees of the service how the material they were capturing was going to be used, they said they didn't know. I did not see any place on-site where CDs/DVDs could be purchased and as of today there is nothing on the web site to indicate that this material is/will be available for purchase.

In addition to the general frustration of not being able to do my job, these restrictions reinforce my concern about the accuracy of some of the data I've seen in on-line reports that appear to be slightly altered regurgitations of Press Releases. For one of the EULAR presentations, I noted a discrepancy in what was contained in the slides the presenter sent to me post conference (at my request) and the data contained in several articles posted on major medical news web sites. I asked the presenter for clarification to be sure that I was interpreting the data correctly. He informed me that the data in the Press Release (the obvious source of the online articles) was not exactly correct as it was taken from two different reports. This is not the first time I've encountered this problem and I'm sure it will not be the last. Often Press Releases are written from the data contained in the abstract (which can be as much as 6 months old) vs what is actually presented during the conference session.

I agree that although it is an interesting approach, using the Americans With Disabilities Act, is not the way to go. Somehow we need to convince the societies that: (1) they should be concerned about the quality of the information that comes out of their conferences; (2) giving the press privileges that other attendees don't have is a perfectly acceptable practice; (3)as you noted - facilitating the free flow of information is the right thing to do.

Feel free to post this if you like.

I'd love to hear similar horror stories from other reporters at other medical meetings. Let's compile a list of medical societies that pretend to welcome reporters, but in fact have policies that make it extremely difficult to cover their conferences.

The American Diabetes Association: A Rant (Updated)

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 04:09:00 +0000

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) is a fine organization, providing important services to the diabetes community, funding critical research, and organizing several fine annual conferences, including their huge and recently concluded 68th Scientific Sessions in San Francisco.

And the ADA hosts a well-run newsroom at this meeting every year. They provided those of us covering the meeting with a comfortable place to work, wireless and wired broadband Internet access, and even tasty and free breakfasts and lunches every day. The red-shirted ADA staffers in the news room were unfailingly cheerful, polite, and very, very helpful.

It's too bad that some of the Association’s misguided policies virtually ensure that a great deal of the coverage of the many important studies presented at this meeting will be incomplete and inaccurate.

Take a look at their news room policies. Videotaping is prohibited. Photography is prohibited in oral and poster sessions. And in an addendum to these policies, handed personally to each news room registrant, they added audio recording --- audio recording! --- to the list of prohibitions.

In fairness, these restrictions apply to all attendees, not just the news media. They were widely ignored by reporters and other attendees. But in at least one large session a security guard bellowed a warning that if he caught anyone using a camera it would be confiscated.

I suppose we should feel grateful that they don't prohibit paper and pencil. If they took this one, small, additional step all of our stories would look something like this:

Diabetes Is Bad for You; a Drug May Help

San Francisco--Researchers at a university somewhere in North America have concluded that diabetes has certain negative consequences for the people who have it. Fortunately, a new drug may help. In a study of a bunch of patients with one of the forms of diabetes, this drug, having a name beginning with the letter R, appeared to help them in one way or another. The investigators said, however, that more research was needed.

-30-

Many of the reporters in the news room expressed annoyance at the irritating restrictions on photography and audio recording. These restrictions were especially galling given that for $200 or so anyone could purchase audio recordings of the entire conference, available on a DVD or online. Many of us would gladly have spent the $200 for these presumably high quality professional recordings. Problem is, they're not going to be available for two weeks. We’re in the news business. In two weeks it's not news, it's olds!

Oh, and guess who's selling those professional recordings. Well I’ll be a monkey's uncle, it's the ADA itself! Could it be that they prohibit audio recording to protect their monopoly? Say it ain't so, Joe.

If this isn't the motivation for these restrictions on reporters, I don't know what is. Are they afraid that results will be reported prematurely? Well then, they shouldn’t make recordings available at all and, for that matter, they shouldn’t publish their abstract volume and they should confiscate all writing material at the door. Hell, they should just cancel the meeting and stay home.

To be fair, the ADA is not the only society that imposes similar restrictions at its annual meeting. I've never understood these restrictions. Don't they want us to report the science accurately? Unless you have training as a court reporter and have learned how to use a stenotype machine, it simply is not possible to take notes fast enough while at the same time trying to understand the science and to evaluate its newsworthiness. (And if reporters started lugging stenotype machines around, some societies would probably prohibit those as well.)

It's especially hard if you’re working for a publication that isn’t afraid of printing actual numbers in its articles. You just can't get all of those numbers in your notes, and often the speaker doesn’t even recite them so they're not even in the audio recording; they're only on the PowerPoint slides. And the only sure way to get those numbers is to photograph the screen with a handy digital camera.

I would love to hear the ADA's rationale for these restrictions, and I'll be sending a link to this post to ADA media representative Colleen Fogarty (703-549-1500 ext. 2146 or cfogarty@diabetes.org) for a response. I'll let you know what she says.

Meanwhile, I think that an enterprising reporter could make an argument that such restrictions violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. Carpal tunnel syndrome and other wrist maladies are among the common occupational hazards of the journalism profession. (“Ink-stained wretches” is an anachronism. “Wrist-wrecked wretches” would be more apt these days.) It seems to me that audio recording and photography could be seen as “reasonable accommodations” (a term of art in the Disabilities Act) for someone whose disability prevents her from taking legible notes fast enough to do her job.

It seems to me that the American Diabetes Association, many of whose members are disabled, shouldn’t be discriminating against those of us with disabling wrist injuries.

But, you know, no one should have to make that argument. The ADA should permit reporters to use the tools of their trade not for fear of a lawsuit and bad publicity, but simply because facilitating the free flow of accurate scientific and medical news is the right thing to do.

UPDATE

I had the following brief email exchange with Colleen Fogarty of the ADA:

June 11, 2008
Colleen,

I'm a medical reporter and the anonymous author of the Medical Conference Blog (http://medmeeting.blogspot.com/). Recently I wrote a blog post that praises the ADA and its news room staff, but criticizes certain of the ADA's news room policies. You'll find that specific post at http://medmeeting.blogspot.com/2008/06/american-diabetes-association-rant.html

I hope you'll take a look at it and consider a response. I'll promise to post your response in full.

Best wishes,

Roueche

On June 12, 2008 she responded:

Hi Roueche,

If you would like to talk to Diane Tuncer, our managing director of Communications, please feel free to call her directly at 703-549-1500, ext. 5510.

However, respectfully, we would like you to share your identity so myself (or Diane) can know to whom we are speaking with.

Thank you,

Colleen

Colleen Fogarty
Specialist, Communications
American Diabetes Association
1701 North Beauregard Street
Alexandria, VA 22311
703-549-1500, ext. 2146
703-549-6294 - fax

And on 6/12/2008 I responded:

Colleen,

Respectfully, I decline to share my identity. Among the ADA's objectionable media policies are explicit threats to ban reporters who violate your policies -- and their organizations -- from covering future meetings. I'm not willing to take that risk.

I hope you and Ms. Tuncer will visit my blog and comment on my criticisms anyway. I believe these criticisms are valid regardless of who I am and what organization employed me to cover your meeting.

If you believe the ADA has a good reason for restricting photography and audio recording by reporters, I'd love to hear it. Such a reason is not articulated anywhere on the ADA web site, or in the press kit, as far as I can tell. Or maybe my arguments were so persuasive that you've decided to change the policy. I'd especially love to hear that.

By the way, my post on the ADA meeting has generated more visitors than any other post on my blog, with one exception (http://medmeeting.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-to-find-medical-conferences.html). Try googling "American Diabetes Association news room" (without the quotes). You'll find my ADA post among the first page of results.

Cheers,

Roueche

I've heard nothing since.

Breaking In to Conference Coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:15:00 +0000

> Hello,
>
> I stumbled onto your blog today and appreciate the resource. I am a
> medical writer who currently writes lots of abstracts and posters and
> I'd like to break into conference coverage, particularly in the areas
> of [redacted].
> I've previously done some conference coverage at [redacted]. Do you have any
> suggestions for how to go about this? Which outlets are best for a
> newby, etc?
>
> I've heard starting out, companies don't usually pay travel--but will
> they pay conference registration fees?
>
> Thank you for your time,
> [redacted]

[Redacted],

I'm happy you're finding my blog useful. If I could get off my duff and
update it more than once a month it would be more useful still.

If I were trying to break into conference coverage, I would focus on
medical trade papers and other resources for physicians (such as
docguide.com) rather than general interest publications. Many of the
medical trades use freelancers, especially when the freelancer is local
to the conference and so wouldn't need to travel. I don't know how many
conferences are in [your city], but you may want to consider which other
cities are a doable commute for you. Then find out what the upcoming
conferences are and contact the trade papers you've decided to target.

You're right that most of these companies won't pay travel expenses for
someone just starting out, but as you become more of a known quantity,
it's legitimate to expect that they would pay for your travel. And
conference registration fees are rarely an issue. Reporters on
assignment routinely receive complementary registration, especially when
they have an assignment letter and have contacted the conference
sponsors in advance.

Please feel free to contact me with additional questions.

Roueche

That goes for the rest of you as well. I'm happy to answer questions from new and aspiring medical and science writers.

9 Tips for Covering an Unfamilar Specialty

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 17:58:00 +0000

Yesterday I had one of my recurring nightmares. I'm covering a medical conference in an unfamiliar specialty. I can't understand a word anyone is saying. My recorder isn't working. Neither is my camera. Oh, and I'm naked.

Except for that last one I've experienced all of those calamities in real life. And (again except for that last one) I've found ways to to salvage those bad situations.

Today I'll discuss what to do if you find yourself covering an unfamiliar specialty.

1. First rule: don't let yourself get into that situation. When you're assigned to cover a specialty that's new to you, begin preparing at least a week in advance. Visit the society's web site. Google previous coverage of that meeting. Skim through a textbook. Learn the lingo and try to determine the important unanswered questions and controversies in the field.

But for the sake of argument, let's say that that much preparation is impossible. Maybe you got a last minute assignment, and you're going to the conference tomorrow. Maybe you're just lazy, and you find yourself sitting in the conference room, reading the program, and not even understanding the titles of the talks. What do you do then?

2. Attend the keynote speech and the first plenary session. I usually skip keynote speeches because they're often just broad overviews with little news value. But that's just the type of presentation that's perfect for bringing you up to speed. The first plenary session is likely to be at least somewhat newsier and will give you big pointers to the important issues in the field.

3. Don't panic if the jargon is so thick that you can barely tell whether the speakers are using English. I find that if I just let that jargon wash over me I begin understanding it after the first morning of the conference.

4. For that reason, it's especially important to record those first few talks, even if you doubt that they'll be newsworthy. Once you've absorbed the jargon, you'll be able to listen to those first talks with new ears.

5. Make a point to walk through the industry exhibits early in the meeting. You'll quickly learn the names and uses of the drugs and devices important to specialists in that field.

6. Pick up a copy of the conference's daily newspaper if it has one.

7. Latch onto a friendly colleague. Reporters familiar with a specialty often know even better than the specialists themselves the important issues in the field. It's my experience that there's a decent level of camaraderie in most meeting press rooms, and few reporters guard their scoops jealously.

8. Pick the brains of the meeting press officers. They're usually medical writers too, and they're eager to point you to the hot topics and the good sessions.

9. At least glance at the press releases inside and outside the press room, even if you have no interest in covering the touted stories. Press releases are usually written by professional writers like us specifically for reporters, and they're likely to put the topic in context and define their terms.

Advice from a veteran to a newbie

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 18:53:00 +0000

Interesting Q&A on the nasw-freelance listserve. I thank Nancy Allison and Bob Roehr for allowing me to quote their posts in full.

First, Nancy's question:

Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2008 15:50:33 +0000 (GMT)
From: Nancy Allison 
Subject: [NASW-Freelance] First medical conference
To: NASW-Freelance discussion list 

Hi everybody,
I'm a new member of NASW and have written about health issues for consumer and university magazines, but have never attended a medical conference (or written about one).

This summer, I will be in Paris during the dates of the European League Against Rheumatism conference. My stepmother has scleroderma, so I am interested in going anyway to hear about new research.

But I'd also like to write about the conference and make some new contacts. Is it crazy to think that I can do this, never having done it before? I really don't know where to start.

Any pointers (I realize that they might be in the vein of: "stick to alumni magazines, honey!") would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Nancy Allison

Then Bob's response:

Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2008 11:43:31 EST
From: BobRoehr@aol.com
Subject: Re: [NASW-Freelance] First medical conference
To: nasw-freelance@nasw.org

I think a lot of it depends on what you mean by "conference coverage." My  experience is that generally it means writing about individual resentations or sessions for a clinician reader, with rapid turn around -- often that same night, or within 1-2 weeks of the conference.

Ideally one has experience covering conferences and knows the subject  matter inside out. The later is important to both understand the materials as they whip by, and to make editorial judgments on what is new/important in the context of what has been presented and published in the field in the last 6-12 months. If you don't have that background knowledge base, then trying to pick it up at a conference and simultaneously turn it around on short deadline is a nearly impossible task; it is not the situation for on the job training.

If you do have that type of background knowledge of rheumatism, and have  written about it with clips to show (ideally with the level of detail for a  clinical not a consumer audience), the next step is to get a sense of where that particular conference stands in the hierarchy of meetings on the subject. There  has been such a proliferation of meetings over the last few decades -- many operated largely to generate revenue for either a company or a professional association -- that editors and publishers have to be judicious in what they cover. Only then would I think about researching what publication and editor to  approach.

Keep in mind that coverage is planned and assigned 3-12 months in advance  with most organizations, and they tend to use the same people to cover the  same meetings year after year because they have the knowledge base to do so and are known quantities that can deliver a good product on deadline. But there are  always conflicts with other meetings and churn, sometimes at the last minute.

Bob Roehr

That's excellent advice from a true veteran. I'd only take issue with one minor point. Although I've covered many different areas of medicine, I'm occasionally assigned to a meeting in a specialty I'm not familiar with. I usually feel at sea during the first half-day or so of the meeting, but once I've absorbed the lingo and figured out the issues that are important to the docs in that field, I can write intelligently about the presentations. Understanding statistics and medical science in general can go a long way if you're a quick study.

This gives me an idea for a blog post that I hope to write in the next few days: Rules for Covering Conferences in an Unfamiliar Specialty.

Ingelfinger Again

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 17:49:00 +0000

Today I'm engaged in an interesting colloquy with Dr. Ben Goldacre, a physician and author of the always provocative Bad Science Blog.

In a blog post entitled The Joy of Ingelfingering Dr. Goldacre argues that embargoes and the Ingelfinger Rule are good things, and that journalists should refrain from publishing articles about research that has not been peer reviewed, and that when they write about peer-reviewed research they should include links to the full text of the original research paper.

I've written about the Ingelfinger Rule before, and I clearly disagree with Dr. Goldacre's conclusions, although his analysis is very interesting.

In the comments to Dr. Goldacre's post I asked him whether he'd prohibit coverage of medical conferences, considering that virtually no presentations are peer reviewed with full experimental details fully published. He replied that covering medical conferences could lead to inaccurate reporting about "turkeys." No argument there, but at some point we have to recognize that journalism is not meant to be the last word, only "the first draft of history."

You Don't Have to be a Physician to Get Some of that Nice Pharma Dough. Journalists Qualify Too (Or Do They?)

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 02:12:00 +0000

According to a recent article in the prestigious British Medical Journal, many medical journalists, particularly those covering medical conferences, have conflicts of interest as bad as or worse than the physicians they're covering.

The article, entitled "Journalists: anything to declare?" is by Ben Goldacre, a physician and writer in London who has a column in The Guardian (a British daily) and is the author of the entertaining Bad Science blog.

[The full reference is BMJ 2007;335:480 (8 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.39328.450000.59 -- You can read an excerpt for free, but in order to read the full article you'll need a subscription or $$.]

According to Dr. Goldacre,

Much as I like to think that I am cynical and worldly, beinga doctor and a journalist, the world still holds some surprisesfor me. Conflict of interest is a subject that creates heatand concern, not least among journalists, who often stumbleon a banal and openly declared interest and use it to buildfantasies of medical corruption and Pulitzer prizes . . .

Given the puritanical stance of somany journalists, I was surprised last week by an email circularI received from a science writers' mailing list. It was fromthe Aspirin Foundation, a group funded by the drug industry,and it was offering—on behalf of Bayer Healthcare—topay expenses for journalists to attend the European Societyof Cardiology's conference in Vienna. . . .

[I]n my naivety I had no idea such things went on. I pinged offa few emails to friends and colleagues. Most poked fun at myinnocence—quite rightly—but some were helpful. Notonly is it extremely common for journalists to take money fromdrug companies, but there have been some astonishing cases inrecent history, including one memorable case where a PR companyinvited journalists to "an exclusive preview" of new laser eyetechnology, with the offer to "discuss free treatment in returnfor editorial features."

"I organise the media programmes for a number of medical conferencesrun by scientific societies," said one person who, without wishingto be melodramatic, has asked to remain anonymous, "and I reckonat least 50% of the journalists present are paid for by drugcompanies. They get pretty well looked after too—firstclass travel, five star hotels, posh dinners, etc. Some of themindulge in double dipping, where they are paid by the day bythe drug company and then by the publication that takes whateverthey have written.

Dr. Goldacre goes on to decry the closeness between journalists and the PR folks from the pharmaceutical companies and the revolving door between journalism and PR.

I have a number of reactions to Dr. Goldacre's article.

I subscribe to many science writers' mailing lists, but I never saw that venal enticement from Bayer's astroturf organization. I wonder what list it was on and what exactly it said.
What am I, chopped liver? I've never received such an offer from a pharmaceutical company.
I simply don't believe Dr. Goldacre's correspondent who estimates that 50% of the journalists (or more!) are "paid for by drug companies." I've been in this profession for decades, and while I've heard whispers about such practices, I would have heard shouts if every second reporter was in the pocket of Big Pharma.
Perhaps this is a case of a paranoid meeting organizer. Some seem to spend a lot of time trying to weed out people who (by their definition) are not "legitimate, credentialed press."
Maybe it's that I'm as naive as Dr. Goldacre, or maybe this practice is far less common than he maintains. I do know that some pharmaceutical companies send writers to medical meetings and pay them to write meeting reports, but those are almost always for internal consumption.
The only time I've ever seen medical journalists flying First Class is when they're using their hard-earned frequent-flyer miles.
And don't get me started on five star hotels. Not every reporter likes staying there. As I've written before, "You can tell you're in a five-star hotel by the beautiful view, the plush bathrobes, and the disquieting sensation of a disembodied hand rooting around in your pockets for every last bit of spare change."
And posh dinners? I feel fortunate if I have a minute to set my pen down and gobble a little piece of the rubber chicken at a dinner presentation.
I think that in his article Dr. Goldacre is engaging in a bit of playground repartee: "I'm rubber you're glue, your words bounce off me and stick to you," or, "I know you are, but what am I?" I'm afraid I don't find those "arguments" any more persuasive now than when I was in third grade.
Having said all that, of course I'd be appalled if I learned that a journalist accepted money from Big Pharma and then published a seemingly objective article in the independent press. Just as I'm appalled when I see physicians hawking drugs made by their pharmaceutical company overlords at supposedly independent medical meetings.
If journalists are doing this, they're ashamed and they're keeping it secret. Physicians, on the other hand, seem all too delighted to brag about how many companies they've served as a consultant for, or to express sorrow that they don't have as many conflicts as their colleagues.

(Tip of the hat to PRWatch which called my attention to Dr. Goldacre's article.)

Restrictions on Recording Medical Meetings

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 21:16:00 +0000

The organizers of most medical meetings allow members of the press to have unlimited access to their meetings. But every so often I'll run into a meeting where there are restrictions against photography (most frequently) and against audio recording (less frequently).

I think there's little justification for any of these restrictions; if reporters are allowed to be present, they should be allowed to do their jobs as long as they don't disrupt the meeting.

At the recent annual meeting of the American Psychological Association a member of the press office staff apparently attempted to enforce a silly rule against a reporter from Democracy Now!: a 10-minute limit on recording during the session. The APA was debating a resolution on the participation of psychologists in military torture.

Science writer Norman Bauman chronicled what happened in a post on the nasw-talk mailing list, which is maintained by the National Association of Science Writers. With Mr. Bauman's permission, I'm quoting his message in full:

Amy Goodman, broadcast producer of DemocracyNow!, had a showdown with the

American Psychological Association's PR department this weekend, when they

ordered her to stop recording a session about psychologists participating in

military torture.

She refused to stop, and the PR department threatened to call security.

Goodman publicly announced to the audience that the APA leadership was

refusing to let her record, and asked the members whether they wanted her to

continue recording. As you can hear on the recording, the audience

overwhelmingly wanted her to record, because they wanted their debate to be

disseminated to the public. Someone made a motion, and they voted to let her

continue recording.

The APA meeting this weekend in San Francisco debated a resolution, which an

APA committee had approved, on the participation of psychologists in

military interrogations. 6 members of the 10-member committee worked for the

military. Dissident members said that ethics code has a loophole which

permits torture -- if there is a conflict between the ethics code and a law

or military regulation, a psychologist can follow the law or regulation.

The APA PR department had limited Goodman's taping of the session to 10

minutes, and tried to stop her when she ran over 10 minutes.

The APA prohibited her from recording some sessions at all, but she recorded

them anyway.

The APA is the last medical professional organization to let its members

participate in torture. The American Medical Association and American

Psychiatric Association declared that it was unethical for their members to

participate in torture.

Here's the transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: Not long after the town hall meeting had begun, the APA's

public affairs officer approached Democracy Now! and told us to stop

filming. She said we could only tape ten minutes and that we had passed our

time limit. I got on the microphone and told the people gathered at the

meeting what was happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Excuse me, just [inaudible] a point of procedure. We're told

that reporters are only allowed to record for ten minutes, and Pamela

Willenz of the APA said that she will call security on us now, because we're

going to be recording for more than ten minutes. So I was wondering if there

could be any sense of the meeting, or a rationale, since this is a town hall

meeting, for not being allowed to record for more than ten minutes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We want to vote.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN 1: Can we vote to allow recording at the town hall

meeting? Can we all vote to allow recording?

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN 1: Can we vote to allow recording?

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN 2: We want the press to witness this.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN 1: Can everyone who approves of allowing the reporters to

record please raise your hand?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: OK, folks, the recording will continue through the session

###

I think this is a good example of how to deal with organizations that won't

let you cover a legitimate news event of public importance.

I've been in situations like this, where people threated to have me

arrested, and I stood up to them. They backed down.

In the analysis of how the news media failed us in Iraq, one White House TV

reporter said that it's hard to stand up in the White House press room and

challenge the President of the United States.

Journalists have a privileged position in the U.S., because we have a role

set out for us in the Constitution. We can have a good time, and lots of

perks, writing interesting stories, but in exchange we have an obligation to

supply our readers with the information they need. A lot of journalists

failed their job, because they were too timid to stand up to authority when

it was their responsibility to do so. As a result 500,000 Iraqis died.

DemocracyNow! is broadcast (in New York, anyway) on the radio at 9am EST,

but you can see it on the Internet. Theyalso make a full transcript available in the afternoon. I recommend that everyone read the transcript or listen to it, and in particular listen to Goodman's confrontation with the APA.

The next time you have to stand your ground, you can remember how Goodman

did it.

I previously said that I think Goodman is the best interviewer in the U.S.,

since the demise of the Playboy Interview. Her best interview, I think, was

her interview with Bill Clinton . She was the only reporter I can think of who asked him about solid issues.

Goodman was once reporting on a peaceful demonstration in East Timor, when

the (U.S.-supported) military opened fire, killing several demonstrators,

and beat her and another reporter to the ground with rifle butts. So she

doesn't have any trouble standing up to Presidents of the United States. She

was in more combat than they were. [end of Norman Bauman's nasw-talk post]

Link to the Democracy Now! segment with that exchange.

Link to the entire 20 August 2007 show.

What do you think? Are restrictions on recording or photography ever appropriate at medical meetings?

Science writers protest $675 fee for influenza conference

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Tue, 01 May 2007 03:50:00 +0000

As reported in Jim Romanesko's column, the National Association of Science Writers has written a letter of protest objecting to an outrageous fee that the Options for the Prevention and Control of Influenza IV conference (Toronto, June 17-23.2007) is charging reporters for the privilege of doing their jobs.

In addition to the $675 fee (which clearly favors large mainstream-media organizations), reporters are being barred from covering some of the scientific sessions (what will they be discussing in those closed sessions, I wonder?), and in what seems like a juvenile display of petty spite, reporters will not have access to the scientific abstracts.

The organizer of this conference is Nancy J. Cox, Ph.D., an employee of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Cox was named Federal Employee of the Year in 2006. She is apparently unaware of the decades-long practice of allowing reporters to cover medical and scientific conferences without paying an admission fee. Or maybe she is aware but doesn't care. Or maybe the decision was in someone else's hands, and she'll quickly correct this mistake after receiving NASW's protest letter.

The letter was signed by NASW president Robert Lee Hotz, formerly of the Los Angeles Times and currently of the Wall Street Journal. I've reproduced his letter below. He makes the excellent point that much of this research was supported by public funds and deals with a subject of vital public interest. If you'd like to add your voice to his, you can reach Dr. Cox at nancy.cox@cdc.hhs.gov, phone: 404.639.2748, fax: 404.639.2334. Or you can reach CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding at julie.gerberding@cdc.hhs.gov, phone 404.639.7000.

Here's the NASW letter:

Director, Influenza Division
Director, WHO Collaborating Center for Epidemiology and Control of Influenza
National Center for Immunizations and Respiratory Diseases (proposed)
Coordinating Center for Infectious Disease
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Atlanta, Georgia, USA

April 30, 2007

Dear Dr. Cox,

As president of the National Association of Science Writers, which represents 2,500 science and medical writers, I was surprised to learn that reporters will be charged $675 to attend and cover the Options for the Control of Influenza VI conference in Toronto, June 17-23, 2007. I was also dismayed to be informed that members of the press will not be given access to the conference abstracts and will be barred from some scientific proceedings.

For decades, it has been accepted practice for legitimate members of the press to be admitted to scientific and medical conferences without charge, in order to promote the timely dissemination of accurate scientific information to the public that funds such research. In this instance especially, which concerns matters so vital to public health, we would expect that you, as conference chair, and other organizers would actively encourage public dissemination of the scientific results to be presented, as a matter of sound public policy and professional conscience.

I join with our board of directors in urging the organizers of the Options for the Control of Influenza VI conference to drop their policy of charging reporters an admission fee and lift the other restrictions on open coverage of its proceedings.
I would be happy to discuss this matter with the conference organizers at their convenience.

Sincerely yours,

Robert Lee Hotz
President, National Association of Science Writers
New York, NY 10012
hotz@nasw.org

UPDATE 5/3/07

The conference organizers appear to have changed some of their objectionable
press registration policies. The $675 fee has disappeared, but the restrictions
on reporters attending some sessions and the ridiculous refusal to provide
reporters with abstracts still remain. See here. More to come later.

8 Rules for a Happy Press Room at a Medical Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:25:00 +0000

Today I'm one of the dozens of journalists covering the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in Los Angeles. This is a terrific meeting, with lots of interesting news. One of the things that makes this meeting great—at least from a reporter's point of view—is that it has an exceptionally well-run press room. Here are 8 factors, some critical, some trivial, and some frivolous, that make for a happy press room at a medical meeting.

1. The number one rule is to put a highly competent PR people in charge. Staci Vernick Goldberg, Greg Lester, Angela DeCicco, and their AACR colleagues exemplify this sort of competence. They're knowledgeable, they're friendly, they're helpful, and they're solicitous without being smarmy.

2. Help reporters out by identifying the most important and newsworthy stories in advance of the meeting. Prepare embargoed news releases about these stories that include all the important details such as the investigators' affiliation, their titles, and their sources of funding. The most important aspect of the story should be in the lede, the way reporters write, and not at the end, the way scientists do.

3. Arrange news briefings with the investigators associated with these top stories. These news briefings need to be close to the time of the actual presentations, and not a day or two later.

4. Contact researchers' institutions well in advance of the meeting and encourage their PR departments to issue their own news releases. This is, perhaps, the only area in which the AACR folks fell short. For such a large meeting, there were relatively few external news releases. I've written about this issue before.

5. Prepare a press kit containing basic information about the association sponsoring the meeting, the news releases mentioned above, and the actual abstracts of the scientific presentations. For bonus points, make sure reporters preregistered for the meeting received this press kit at least a week in advance. For double bonus points make sure the press kit is available in both printed and electronic forms. For triple bonus points see item 8 below.

6. Pay attention to the physical layout of the press room. It should be big enough and have enough table space to accommodate the expected number of reporters. It should be carpeted to dampen the sound of folks chatting so others can work. It should have an adequate electrical supply, lots of phones, a good number of computers for reporters who don't lug their laptops, printers, and lots of ethernet connections or WiFi capacity to satisfy those who do lug their laptops. The AACR press room has computer terminals, printers, and ethernet cables all around the room as well as a high capacity WiFi system.

7. At a minimum a press room should never run out of coffee. To reporters covering a medical meeting caffeine is more important than oxygen. For bonus points have bottled water and soft drinks. For double bonus points provide snacks such as cookies or fruit. For triple bonus points provide some sandwiches at lunchtime, because reporters on deadline often find it difficult finding time to take bathroom breaks, not to mention finding time to hunt down a decent restaurant. For quadruple bonus points and the grand prize, do what the AACR folks did: provide a hot breakfast and a hot lunch every single day, and make sure the food is excellent. The food at this press room exemplified the critical difference between oncologists and cardiologists that I described previously.

8. Provide useful swag. Every AACR attendee, not just reporters, received a high-quality tote bag. Reporters additionally received a swanky metallic pen in a velveteen envelope and a 512 MB flash drive containing a preloaded electronic version of the 99-page press kit.

13 Rules for Finding the Perfect Seat at a Medical Conference: A Journalist's Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 21:30:00 +0000

These rules are more or less in the order of importance.

1. This may seem almost too obvious even to mention , but you can't sit in a seat that someone else is occupying. The key to getting a good seat is to get to the room as early as possible. As you'll see, there are so many constraints defining the perfect seat thatin many conference rooms there are only a handful of acceptable choices. (Actually, since some of the constraints are quite stringent, in many rooms there's not a single seat that satisfies all of them, so the only choice is to choose the least bad seat.)

2. You want to be sitting near the front, especially if you hope to grab the speakers for interviews or photos immediately after their talks.

3. You want to be sitting at a conference table, if possible, not in the rows of chairs behind the conference tables in many conference rooms. A table allows you to spread out your material, your notepad, the conference program, your recorder, your camera, your glass of water, and your coffee. If the room's not completely full, I often try to spread my material over two adjacent spaces at a conference table.

4. Don't sit by the pitcher of ice water often placed at intervals on the conference tables. Not only does it decrease the amount of real estate available to spread out, but there is a danger of spills or drips as people lean over you to get glasses of water. Murphy demonstrated conclusively that those spills and drips will certainly land directly on your sensitive electronic equipment.

5. If there are no conference tables, it's critical to appropriate two adjacent chairs. The alternative is to balance the notepad, program, recorder, and camera on your knees, putting the coffee and water underneath the seat. That way lies madness.

6. Aisle seats are critical. Otherwise you'll be annoying people every time you need to run up for a photo or for a word with the speaker.

7. You want to sit as close to the front as possible, but notice where the loudspeakers are. Often they're located behind the first few rows and pointed to the back of the auditorium. If you're closer to the front than the loudspeakers, your recording will sound muffled. If the sound is bad in one part of the room, you may have to move to another during the first talk

8. You want to sit where there's a clean line of sight to the screen, especially if you plan to photograph the speakers' PowerPoint presentations. It's really annoying when the bald head of the guy sitting in front of you obscures the one piece of data you need to complete your article. It's often best to sit a bit farther from the screen if that allows you to put the center aisle between the screen and your camera. That aisle makes it less likely that you'll have an obstructed view.

9. Don't sit too close to the video projector. Not only is the warm air blown by the exhaust fans annoying, but your recorder is likely to pick up a lot of background noise.

10. Some meetings have rules against taking photographs or making audio recordings. I believe such rules don't--or at least shouldn't--apply to reporters, in much the same way that TV camera crews at a major news event refer to designated no-parking areas as "the minicam zone." But if you're anticipating an argument with one of the medical society employees, discretion being the better part of valor, you may want to sit in the middle of the auditorium and away from an aisle.

11. If you're at a big meeting, and you're covering parallel sessions in different rooms, you're going to want to sit fairly close to an exit door.

12. If you take notes on your laptop, try to find a seat at the edge of the auditorium, near a source of electrical power.

13. If you're going to be sitting through some boring talks before you get to the good ones, sit where there's good WiFi reception. That way you can catch up on your e-mail and even write blog posts to while away the time.

Ghost Writers on the Sly

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:44:00 +0000

I noticed something strange about a couple of posters I covered at a recent conference. Both reported clinical trials on the same drug, and both acknowledged that the studies were supported by GlaxoSmithKline, the drug's manufacturer.

That wasn't strange. Pharmaceutical companies sponsor clinical trials all the time, and they frequently report the results of the trials (at least the favorable ones) at medical conferences.

What was strange was the authorship of those studies. In one study the first author was a physician at an obscure hospital in an obscure town in Ohio, and the other five authors were GlaxoSmithKline employees. In the other study four of the six authors were physicians at a private specialty practice in Southern California, and the other two authors were GlaxoSmithKline employees.

I suspect that the physician in Ohio and the physicians in Southern California were not truly the investigators who carried out the study or analyzed the results, and they almost certainly didn't write the poster presentations. They were "beards," enticed by GlaxoSmithKline to add the appearance of independence to studies that were designed and analyzed by company scientists, with the results written up in-house by a ghost writer.

This is an unfortunately common practice in the pharmaceutical industry, and GlaxoSmithKline is certainly not the only offender. One of the most highly publicized cases of ghostwriting by pharmaceutical companies involved Procter & Gamble, their osteoporosis drug Actonel, and a scientist named Aubrey Blumsohn, a pathologist, bone specialist, and formerly a professor at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals, Sheffield, UK.

Dr. Blumsohn relates this complex--and still evolving--story on his blog, and it's been covered fairly extensively in the press, including in a detailed article that appeared in Slate at the end of 2005. Briefly, after giving a $252,000 research contract to Sheffield Teaching Hospitals for a study on Actonel, Procter and Gamble employees analyzed the data and had a ghost writer prepare abstracts for several medical conferences, listing the Sheffield scientists as senior authors. Dr. Blumsohn suspected that the analyses may not have been kosher, and he requested access to the randomization codes that would allow him to conduct independent analyses. Incredibly, Procter & Gamble repeatedly denied the senior author of the study full access to the data that he himself had generated.

You'll have to read Dr. Blumsohn's blog for all the ins and outs of this astounding story. He ended up losing his job for daring to discuss that story with journalists. He finally did get access to some, but not all, of the raw data. He has reanalyzed this data and has begun publishing these re-analyses, which to no one's surprise are somewhat less favorable to Actonel than the original analyses.

In his latest blog post, Dr. Blumsohn describes how Procter & Gamble continues to act very strangely. He submitted an abstract of his reanalysis to be presented at an upcoming meeting of the International Bone and Mineral Society. As he is required to do by the society's disclosure rules, he acknowledged that the original research was supported by Procter & Gamble. Somehow, a mysterious Procter & Gamble scientist named Dr. Purple got a hold of this abstract in advance of publication and demanded that the society remove the funding disclosure. The society agreed at first, but when it became apparent after Dr. Blumsohn's complaints that he had not authorized the disclosure's removal, they put it back in. Dr. Blumsohn includes documentary evidence of his allegations on his blog, including the orginal abstract as well as email correspondence between the society and Dr. Purple (who may well have stepped out of a game of Clue, holding a candlestick in the conservatory).

I'm a writer myself, and I know honorable writers who ghostwrite scientific articles for pharmaceutical companies. I don’t believe that this, in itself, is unethical, as long as all the study's authors are aware that this is being done, as long as they have all had full access to the data, and as long as they endorse all of the study’s results and interpretations. Some medical journals have begun insisting that all co-authors of a paper describe their roles in the study and formally state that they endorse its results and conclusions. Perhaps the organizers of medical meetings should take similar steps.

A Poster with Bite

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 00:47:00 +0000

There's a big difference between science writing and scientific writing. That difference nearly bit me on the ass at the last meeting I attended.

Scientific writing is highly formalized. Following the abstract, articles start with an Introduction that describes the background of the study. In the Methods section, which comes next, the investigators describe how the experiment was conducted. Then come the Results, the actual data generated by the experiment. At the end will be a section called the Discussion or the Conclusion that explains what the results mean.

In journalistic science writing the order is completely different. Journalists typically lead with the most interesting conclusion, go on to describe some of the results, and only then give the important background. (This is true for news articles; it tends to be less true for feature articles or personal essays.)

When I cover poster sessions, therefore, I look for promising titles, and when I find one I tend to go straight to the lower right-hand corner of the poster to read the conclusions. If the conclusions seem newsworthy enough, I'll go back and read the Introduction, the Methods, and the Results.

I'm not normally under heavy deadline pressure when I'm covering a medical conference. Since I usually work with publications that have monthly deadlines, I have the luxury of spending most of my time at meetings collecting stories that I'll write when I return to my office.

But last week I was working for a wire service that needed a fresh, newsworthy story from the meeting completely written by 11:30 a.m. No problem, I thought. There was a poster session starting at 9 a.m., and sitting in my hotel room the night before I circled about a dozen promising titles in the program. I showed up at the poster session as soon as the doors opened, and I figured I'd have no trouble choosing one of the posters by about 9:30, and then I’d have two full hours to write.

Trouble is, none of those dozen posters was exciting enough or newsworthy enough to make a good wire story. A handful of them were decent, and I planned to write about them in the coming weeks, but none had that certain je ne sais quoi.

Abandoning the list of posters I identified by their titles, I started walking up and down the aisles at a gradually increasing pace and with a growing sense of alarm. Nothing was grabbing me, and time was a'wasting. Finally I found a poster describing an epidemiological study of a disease that was difficult to diagnose. Moving straight to the conclusions, I found a sentence about "the high frequency of death from asphyxia in undiagnosed patients" in the 15-year interval between when symptoms appeared in the average patient and when that patient received a proper diagnosis.

Bingo! There's my lead, I thought. Short of time, I snapped a few shots of the poster with my digital camera and ran up to the press room while composing a sexy lead in my head. "Patients with Roueche's syndrome [not its real name] wait an average of 15 years between the appearance of their first symptoms and the proper diagnosis, and during that time x% of them will suffocate to death, according to a poster presentation at the annual meeting of the blah, blah, blah."

By this time it was 10 a.m. I still have 90 minutes to write, I thought, no problem. So I sat down, uploaded the photos of the poster to my laptop, and started reading the Introduction, the Methods, and the Results. The poster contained a relatively complex presentation of the results, with some data described in prose, some data in tables, and some data in grafts. I stared at that for another 15 minutes, all the while searching for the numbers to back up the "high frequency of death from asphyxia" conclusion, but as far as I could tell there wasn't a single sentence, table, or graph that dealt with that.

I ran down to the poster session hoping to find the study's author. Although this was the time period set aside for authors to stand by their posters, she was nowhere to be found. I stood next to that poster so long waiting for her to return that passersby assumed I was the author and started asking me questions.

After another ten minutes I realized that the first author apparently wouldn't be returning, but I also realized that the author of the poster immediately to the left was the second author (out of ten) of my poster. Shifting anxiously from foot to foot, I waited until he was free of the person he was talking to, and I introduced myself and asked him if he'd be able to answer one question about the poster I was interested in. He agreed, so I asked him what data supported the "high frequency of death from asphyxia" sentence in the conclusions.

"Oh, that's not correct," he said. He went on to say that only about one person dies from asphyxia due to undiagnosed Roueche syndrome every couple of years.

"So how did this conclusion get into the poster?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"But you're the second author."

"Yes, but I wasn't involved in preparing the poster. I’ll have to have a word with Dr. Smith [the first author]."

With less than an hour before my deadline, my life started flashing before my eyes, and my own death from asphyxia began to seem preferable to the conversation I'd soon be having with my editor. "How the hell am I going to salvage this situation?" I wondered.

It was too late to find another poster to write about, so I was stuck with this one. I ended up keeping the 15-year gap in diagnosis as the lead while leaving out the dramatic bit about the "high frequency of death from asphyxia." I wrote like the wind, and I uploaded the story at about 11:29:45.

The moral of the story? Don't assume that the conclusions of a scientific study are supported by its data.

Why So Few News Releases at Medical Meetings?

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 03:39:00 +0000

When covering medical meetings became a routine part of my job, I was surprised at how few news releases I found in the press rooms. Sure, the big meetings—the ASCOs, the AHAs, the RSNAs—would have a decent number of news releases, but even those had fewer than I would have expected.

I started my in science writing career in the public relations office of a major university. Part of my job involved writing news releases on important scientific advances. I was pretty successful at this; on a number of occasions articles sparked by my press releases ended up on the front page of the New York Times and other major publications. I discovered that reporters are essentially lazy. If you hand them a tasty morsel on a silver platter, they're more likely to take it than an equally tasty morsel they have to dig for. This is no insult to reporters; we all have a limited amount of time, so it's not surprising that we take the story that's handed to us. Furthermore, reporters are subject to competitive pressures. When there's a news release attached to a research result, I know that my competition is likely to pick up the story, and if they do and I don't, my editor will want to know why we were scooped.

Every university and virtually every hospital in the United States has a public relations, media relations, or public information office. Every one of those offices employs writers whose job is to promote the institution's research. A medium-sized medical meeting will include talks from researchers representing several dozen institutions, and the large medical meetings will include talks from researchers representing hundreds of different institutions. Why then is it unusual for me to find more than a handful of news releases at all but the largest meetings? Here are some possible answers:

Most of the research studies presented at medical meetings are not newsworthy. They involve minor advances that are of interest only to a narrow handful of specialists. This is the best excuse a public information officer can give for not issuing a news release. You don't want your institution to become known for issuing news releases on research that is not newsworthy, because reporters will quickly learn to toss all news releases from your institution into the circular file.

But this doesn't explain why so many truly newsworthy studies from institutions with large PR offices are unaccompanied by news releases.

There are different levels of newsworthiness. Some studies are of interest to the lay public and the mass media, and PR folks tend to focus on these studies, ignoring studies that would be quite newsworthy to the trade press. To many researchers, having their study covered by Oncology Times (for example) would confer more prestige among their peers than having it covered by the New York Times. (Maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point.)

In my experience, the main reason that PR folks often don't issue news releases to accompany an interesting talk at a medical meeting is that they simply don't know about it. Calling the PR office is often the last thing on a researcher's mind when she's about to present an interesting paper at a meeting. Getting the data together, practicing her talk, and making airline reservations all take priority.

There are several things that a PR person can do about this. She can cultivate relationships with researchers, their postdocs and graduate students, and even departmental secretaries. Merely asking, "Are you going to be presenting any interesting results soon?" will often do the trick.

At big institutions, of course, it won't be possible to cultivate relationships in every lab. But a least one can cultivate relationships in every department. The department chair will often know who's about to present important results.

And it's worthwhile cultivating relationships with the PR folks at the societies sponsoring the major meetings. In a perfect world, those PR folks would be contacting the PR folks at the major universities a month or so before the meeting with a list of all that institution's presenters and the titles of their talks. Some societies, notably the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), have this down to, well, down to a science. But if this isn't a standard part of meeting prep for, say, the American Association for the Advancement of Liposuction, or if their press office sucks (ha), the AAAL PR person can often be persuaded to allow the university PR person advanced access to the meeting program, where she could search for her institution's researchers.

I suppose I've spent an evening in a hotel room writing this this because I'm one of those lazy journalists who loves to find several meaty news releases in the meeting's press room, or better still, on Eurekalert or Newswise a week in advance. Not one institution has issued even a single news release at the meeting I'm at now, even though I've found several very interesting stories from this meeting. This includes the first results from a very large and groundbreaking study from a top university medical center demonstrating the superiority of one surgical technique over another. I think hundreds or thousands of lives may be saved when this result is disseminated throughout the medical community, but as far as I know I'm the only reporter who attended this talk and realized its importance.

How to Find Medical Conferences

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 05:03:00 +0000

It would be nice if there were a comprehensive database of all upcoming medical conferences. An ideal medical-conference database would be easily searchable by date, by location, by specialty, and by keyword. It would present basic information about the conference including contact information and a link to the conference's web page. And it would also be nice if it had travel information, including lists of local restaurants and attractions.

Below you'll find an alphabetized list of 16 19 medical-conference finders, along with my highly subjective evaluations. I've assigned each site a "Roueche Score," based on its usefulness. If I've missed any sites, or if you disagree with any of my evaluations, I encourage you to let me know in the comments or by emailing medmeeting (at) gmail (dot) com.

I tested each site by searching for all meetings in the 2007 calendar year, by using a few keywords to search for certain obscure meetings including several on my list of Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences, and by searching with a few city names.

UPDATE
I updated this page on October 30, 2010 in preparation for my session on How to Cover a Medical Conference at ScienceWriters 2010.

In keeping with its name, allconferences.com lists meetings in all areas including such topics as arts, humanities, business, and recreation in addition to medicine. Unfortunately its listings in medicine (and in a few other areas I checked) are highly incomplete. It has fairly detailed information on the meetings it does list, however. Roueche Score: 2 out of 10

Like allconferences.com, Conferencealerts.com covers a wide range of academic meetings, not just medicine. Its listings in medicine are very weak, missing many important meetings and just about everything on my list of Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences. It provides only limited information on the meetings that are listed, typically just the dates, the location, and the meeting's URL. Roueche Score 2 out of 10

Doctor's Guide is very promising, with an intuitive interface and unusually extensive listings for meetings in the U.S. and around the world. It turned up a number of obscure meetings that I'll be attending in the coming months, but to my surprise it failed on several of my Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences. Roueche Score: 8 out of 10

Although it's targeted at Canadians, Doctor's Review provides a fairly extensive listing of medical meetings in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. I was only able to stump it on a few of the meetings mentioned in Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences. The listings are very basic; just the conference title, location, date, a phone number and/or email address of a contact, and the URL of a web page, which, annoyingly, is not hotlinked. Someone needs to tell those Canadians that PUTTING LISTINGS IN ALL CAPS SEEMS LIKE SHOUTING, AND IT'S VERY HARD ON THE EYES. Roueche Score: 7 out of 10

I've been a fan of Google for many years, but the Google Directory of science conferences is amazingly incomplete. It lists a total of just 76 conferences in medicine, for example. The search function is essentially non-existent, and the only information provided about each conference is a link to the conference site. Worthless. ~~Roueche Score: 1 out of 10~~ Update 10/2010. Now completely defunct. Roueche Score: 1 out of 10

Healthcareconferences.com fails to list many huge and popular medical meetings, not to mention the more obscure ones. That's too bad, because the interface has promise, and the site has many features that could be useful to meeting travelers, including maps, weather, tourist information, restaurant lists, and checklists. ~~Roueche Score: 2 of 10~~ Update 10/2010. Defunct. Roueche Score: 0 of 10

The Health on the Net Foundation has a conference finder site that has some excellent features. The listings are fairly extensive, especially so for CME meetings, but it still fails to list many of my Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences. The standout feature of this site is the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds and podcasts (!) that provide alerts to meetings in a long list of medical specialties. The site has detailed descriptions of meeting content and links to the meeting's web site, but no direct-contact phone numbers or email addresses. Roueche Score: 6 out of 10

The HUM-MOLGEN (human molecular genetics) list of meetings and conferences is narrow but deep. If you're looking for a basic-research or clinical conference on cell biology, molecular genetics, biotechnology, or related fields, this is probably the place to come. No real search feature, except that you can list meetings by date, by subject, or by continent. Links lead to reasonably detailed meeting info. Roueche Score: 9 of 10 (for its narrow subject area) or 3 of 10 overall.

The Journal of the American Medical Association and it's 10 sister "Archives" journals have a very selective calendar of events. Hardly any of my Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences are listed, and there are even some fairly large conferences without listings. But the conferences that are listed are described completely, with all the details one would need for obtaining additional information. The search function is full-featured; too bad that there's not that much to search. Roueche Score: 4 out of 10

Medicalconferences.com claims to list 7,000 medical conferences, and indeed their listings seem to be fairly extensive, especially when it comes to CME. The search function is intuitive. But I couldn't find listings for many of my Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences, and there were significant errors in some of its listings. For example, the site claims that the huge American Academy of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology (AAAAI) 2007 meeting is in Honolulu, when it's actually in San Diego. I can't trust a site with an error that big. ~~Roueche Score 2 out of 10~~ Update 10/2010: Appears to be defunct. Roueche Score: 0 of 10

MediConf appears to be the detritus of a business plan gone bad. It promises the visitor a look at one month of meetings for free. Additional viewing costs $19 (U.S.) per month per country or region. Unfortunately the site doesn't seem to have been updated with any new meetings since December 2004. It's puzzling that this site shows up so high a Google search for medical conferences. ~~Roueche Score: 1 out of 10~~ Update 10/2010: Defunct. Roueche Score: 0 of 10

The MeetingsNet Medical Meetings Finder misses many meetings, even some of the bigger ones. Hardly any of my Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences are listed. Information on the meetings it does find is very limited, offering only dates, locations, the name of the meeting hotel (but no phone number or link), and the name, address, and phone number of the meeting sponsor (but no URL or email address). Roueche Score: 2 out of 10 Update 10/2010: This site focuses on meeting planners.

NatureEvents, sponsored by Nature magazine, covers all areas of science, not just medicine. I didn't evaluate listings in physics, astronomy, or basic biology, but in medicine the listings are woefully inadequate. Many big meetings aren't listed, not to mention the more obscure ones. On the other hand, the meetings that are listed include detailed information, even lists of speakers in some cases. Roueche Score: 2 out of 10

The New England Journal of Medicine lists only the largest meetings, and not even all of those. Hardly any of my Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences are listed. Results of a search are, annoyingly, in alphabetical and not date order. Roueche Score: 2 out of 10

I wanted to like the Newswise conference listings, because Newswise is an excellent resource for journalists, with searchable, embargoed press releases, lists of writing awards, and a number of other interesting features. Unfortunately its Calendar of Medical Meetings is woefully inadequate. Hardly any of my Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences are listed, and some popular meetings are missing as well. There's no search function at all. Roueche Score: 1 out of 10 Update 10/2010: The Newswise conference listings are somewhat improved since I last visited, but it still misses many important meetings. Roueche Score: 3 of 10

The Physician's Guide to the Internet lists only the largest, most popular meetings, but it has a pretty good list of those, including links to the meeting sponsor. No search function, but all meetings listed fit on a single web page, making it most convenient to employ a browser's text search function. The nicest feature of the listings on this page is that they have the dates and locations of not only this year's meetings, but also next year's and the year after that. If you want to know where some of the big meetings will be in 2009, this would be a good place to come. There are also links to sites that will help find restaurants near meeting sites. Roueche Score: 3 out of 10

The Bottom Line
Only 4 of the 16 sites listed here scored above 5 out of 10 on the Roueche Scale. Only two--Doctor's Guide and Doctor's Review--come close to being comprehensive, although props to the HON Meeting Finder Site for its innovative use of RSS feeds and podcasts and to HUM-MOLGEN for excellent listings in its narrow field of interest.

Update, March 27, 2008
Thanks to reader Adam for alerting me to CME Networks, a new player in medical conference listings. Here's my review:

This site is fairly decent on strictly CME meetings, but very, very poor indeed on larger meetings, even ones that have large CME components. While it has a search feature that allows you to search by specialty or keyword, you can't easily combine keywords. For example, there's no convenient ways to find all pediatrics meetings in May or all emergency medicine meetings in San Francisco. They do offer monthly newsletters related to individual specialties, which is nice, as well as an embryonic and little used blog function. Roueche Score: 3 out of 10

Update, October 30, 2010
Thanks to reader IV for alerting me to Clocate, another new player in medical conference listings. Here's my review:

A near perfect site. Listings appear to be fairly comprehensive, and in many cases meetings are listed several years in advance. There's an excellent search function that lets you find meetings by date, category, subject, and location in additional to keywords. Highly recommended, but I docked them a half-point since they didn't have a listing for next year's American Academy of Pediatrics meeting (but this year's just ended). Roueche Score: 9.5 of 10

Gear, Part 1: Digital Voice Recorders

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 02:01:00 +0000

I record all my interviews and all the conference sessions that I cover, and I've been doing so ever since I started in this profession 27 years ago. I'm just not fast enough at taking notes to get exact quotes down, and I also find that listening to a talk a second time enhances my understanding.

In that 27 years I've gone through somewhere between 6 and 10 recorders. At the start I was buying fairly cheap cassette recorders. They were bulky, the sound quality was lousy, and they tended to break in a year or two.

Then I bought a microcassette recorder. It was small, which was terrific, but the sound quality was even lousier. And although the microcassettes were much smaller than standard cassettes, they didn't stack as well, so they were more difficult to store and organize. And the recorders tended to break in a year or two.

Then I decided that I needed something of higher quality, something intended especially for journalists. Sony came out with a line of high quality Pressman cassette recorders. Although they used standard cassettes, they were hardly bigger than 2 or 3 cassettes. They seemed quite sturdy, with metal casings, and they had lots of neat features, the best of which was an index function. When someone came out with a good quote, I could push a button. When listening to the tape later, I could fast-forward until I heard a special sound, which marked the index location. The sound wasn't broadcast quality, but it was much better than I had been used to. These Sony Pressman recorders didn't come cheap--about $200. But they tended to break in a year or two. I went through four of them.

The last one broke in the middle of a meeting. On a Sunday. At a resort far from any big cities. It was 20 miles to the nearest open Radio Shack, where the only cassette recorder was this big bulky thing that cost $19.95. I considered myself lucky when it lasted for the remaining day of the conference.

It was at that point that I started looking into digital voice recorders. I quickly determined that Olympus made the ones that were best for my purposes. I ended up with an Olympus DM-1 (which is no longer made). I've had it for almost 4 years now, and I haven't had the slightest problem with it.

I think the main reason is that it has no moving parts. Cassette recorders have lots of moving parts, and they need to move with quite a bit of precision. If one little plastic gear in its guts gets a little bit out of alignment, the recorder is toast. But digital recording does not depend on moving a long magnetic ribbon past a recording head at a constant speed. Instead the sound information is digitized and stored on the equivalent of a flash drive; a SmartMedia card in the case of the DM-1. A single 128 MB SmartMedia card can store 22 hours at the highest quality setting (still well below broadcast quality), enough for an entire meeting.

Each separate talk can be a separate file, and within each file I can put up to 16 index marks. That makes it far easier to go straight to the talk I want to listen to, and then straight to the most interesting or quotable parts of that talk.

Then I download the files to my computer through a USB cable or with a card reader. And then I use the free software that came with the recorder to transcribe the recording. I also purchased a foot pedal that makes it even easier to transcribe. The recording plays as long as I keep the middle pedal pushed down, and stops the instant I lift my foot. And I've set the software to back up 2 seconds automatically, so when I put my foot back on the pedal it's easy to pick up where I left off. (The left pedal is fast forward, and the right one is reverse.)

The biggest drawback of the DM-1 is that the sound quality with the built-in mic isn't great. I've purchased an external Sony ECM-F01 Flat Mic, which helps a lot, although it's still no where near broadcast quality.

The Olympus DM-1 isn't being sold any more, which is too bad because I like its snazzy blue color. The ones out right now are pretty much silver or black. But I covet the top-of-the-line DS-50, which offers 275 hours of stereo recording and a removable stereo microphone. Unfortunately, I don't expect my DM-1 ever to fail.

Conflict Over Conflicts of Interest

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 18:38:00 +0000

According to an article in the Boston Globe, the American Society of Hypertension has canceled a panel of experts on conflicts of interest at its upcoming meeting (May 19-22, 2007 in Chicago).

"[former New England Journal of Medicine editor Dr. Marcia Angell] Angell, [Dr.Jerry Avorn, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician and Harvard Medical School professor] Avorn, and [Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine] Kassirer were invited to take part in the panel about conflicts of interest by Jean E. Sealey, a researcher and former president-elect of the American Society of Hypertension. Sealey has said the drug industry wields too much influence over the society’s activities through its financial contributions to the group and by paying for honoraria, speakers fees, grants, and research contracts with individual doctors . . .

"The group said in a statement that it sent Sealey’s panel proposal to its continuing medical education review committee, which determined Sealey’s plan to limit the panel to three prominent drug industry critics lacked balance. It suggested adding a Food and Drug Administration official to the roster, but Sealey refused."

The Capsules blog, published by Medical Meetings magazine, called this article to my attention. In addition, Capsules has blogged about COI problems at the American Society of Hypertension two other times, here and here.

Given ASH's continuing COI problems, perhaps it's the entire meeting--and not just that panel--that lacks balance. In my view, the panel of drug industry critics was providing needed balance.

Update: Roy M. Poses, MD, has some additional things to say about this on his Health Renewal Blog.

The Numbers Don't Add Up. Number 1 of a continuing series of pet peeves.

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 21:25:00 +0000

You'd think that people with M.D.s and Ph.Ds and faculty positions in major universities would be able to do simple arithmetic. You'd be wrong.

So I'm writing an article based on a poster presentation of a retrospective study. The topic isn't important. I have the full text of the poster on a piece of paper in front of me. The methods section says that the study involved 29 children hospitalized for serious burns and 73 children hospitalized for other serious injuries. One of the study's dependent variables was whether the children has been breast fed as infants or not. Of those children 47 had been breast fed and 56 had not.

Observant readers will have noticed that 29 + 73 = 102 but 47 + 56 = 103.

The total is 102 for all the other dependent variables, so I'm reasonably certain that there were 102 and not 103 children in the study. Either the number of children who had been breast fed is actually 46 or the number who had not is actually 55.

I pore through all the other numbers on that poster, hoping that there would be a way for me to back-calculate the source of the error. No such luck. By this time it's about 10 minutes before my deadline and after business hours on the Friday before a holiday weekend. There's no realistic possibility of reaching one of the researchers on the phone to resolve the discrepancy.

It clearly wouldn't be right for me to guess which number was correct. That would give me at least a 50% chance of being wrong, and a much greater chance if Murphy's Law is taken into account.

I ended up fudging, writing that "just under half" the children had been breast fed.

I'm telling this story not because it's unusual, but because it's not. It's amazing how often I find numerical errors in studies described in medical conferences. I'd guess it's at least 10%-20% of the time (or about 3 times out of 5, as Dave Barry might say). Occasionally I even find simple arithmetic errors in published papers, errors that apparently went unnoticed during peer review.

Calculated percentages are especially subject to error, for some reason. I've learned to recheck every percentage I plan to quote in my stories.

But I've also found major statistical errors. Once, I was all set to write about a study reporting a statistically significant difference between two groups until I took a close look at the data. There was a bar chart, and one of the groups did appear slightly larger on the relevant variable than the other. But when I took a close look at where the error bars would have been (had the authors put error bars on the bar chart), it was clear that the difference between the two groups was clearly within the margin of error, and there was no way in hell that the difference between them was statistically significant at the p=0.05 level.

I guess the moral of this story is that science and medical writers need to take close and critical looks at the actual numbers in the studies they write about, and not assume that scientists with advanced degrees are capable of calculating a percentage.

Conflicts of Interest--Part 1 of a continuing series

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 01:34:00 +0000

Interesting post on the Health Care Renewal blog about conflict of interest (COI) in continuing medical education (CME) meetings. Quoting a Wall Street Journal article, Roy M. Poses, MD, president of the Foundation for Integrity and Responsibility in Medicine, discusses a case where GlaxoSmithKline, the huge pharmaceutical company, paid a doc $1,000 to $2,500 per talk to appear at CME meetings. At those meetings the doc would advocate certain off-label uses for one of GSK's drugs, while neglecting to disclose that GSK was paying for him to speak.

I'll be discussing COI frequently in this blog. Today I'll make a few points about disclosure, which is often touted as a COI antidote.

More docs seem to be following the disclosure rules these days than in years past, but many still neglect to mention their potential conflicts. Often meeting programs will include a page of speakers' disclosures, which is very helpful. But on that page, after a short list of speakers who have disclosed their various advisory boards, equity interests, and sources of research funding, is a much longer list of "Speakers Disclosing No Conflicts of Interest." This heading is quite misleading, of course. Some folks in this list may have affirmed that they have no conflicts of interest, but others may simply have failed to return the COI form the meeting organizers sent them, and they may have COIs up the wazoo.
Sometimes a speaker's disclosures appear on his first or second PowerPoint slide, which he leaves up for about a microsecond.
Sometimes a speaker will simply say that he sits on every advisory board or speakers' bureau for every pharmaceutical company with drugs in his specialty, implying that he has no motive for touting one company's drug over another.
Sometimes a speaker will state regretfully that he has no disclosures to report, but then jokes that he'd be delighted to talk to anyone in the audience who is willing to help him change that sad state of affairs.
Always the implication of these disclosures is that the speaker is far too principled a scientist and clinician to let any of these financial conflicts cloud his Solomon-like wisdom.

As far as I can tell, the majority of audience members give virtually no weight to what disclosures there are, unless the conflict is so extreme that it can't be ignored. For example, they may give a talk a few mental demerits if the speaker discloses that he holds a patent on the drug or device he's talking about. Otherwise, I believe, they have faith that the speaker would never, no never, let these conflicts affect his judgement. I believe that that faith is often misplaced.

Why I Love Poster Sessions

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 21:44:00 +0000

When I was a graduate student, back in the Pleistocene, there was always a lot of excitement around our specialty's annual convention. The graduate students, postdocs, and faculty in the department all prepared abstracts months in advance of the meeting. (Those abstracts were often works of fiction, reporting data that we hadn't finished analyzing. The coming months were often a desperate scramble to finish the analysis before the meeting. But that's another story.)

We sent these carefully chiseled stone tablets to the meeting's program committee, and then we eagerly awaited their responses. Just about every abstract submitted was awarded a place in the meeting, but it was a special honor to be selected to deliver the paper as an oral presentation, and we were always disappointed when we learned that we'd been relegated to the poster session instead.

I carried that prejudice against poster sessions well into my science writing career. When covering a conference I attended oral sessions exclusively, never even glancing at the list of poster presentations. That all changed when I started a new job and had to return with a dozen or more articles from each meeting, not just the one or two top stories.

In desperation I began trolling the poster sessions, and I quickly discovered that they were well stocked with tasty fish. Here (in no particular order) are some of the reasons I love poster sessions in medical meetings.

Walking through poster sessions is a far more efficient use of my time than sitting in oral presentations. Since scientists present information in the exact opposite way as journalists (conclusions at the end instead of in the lede), I usually have to sit through the entire presentation to figure out whether it's as newsworthy as I guessed, based on the title. Most oral presentations in research meetings are 10-15 minutes long, and in that time I can walk past and scan the conclusions of at least a dozen posters.
Posters are often put up first thing in the morning and taken down either at lunchtime or at the end of the day. That gives me hours to take a look at it, and I can shoehorn it into any part of my daily schedule. But if I miss a 10 minute talk that I need to hear, I'm screwed.
I like to walk through the poster room after the posters have been put up, but before the official start of the poster session. The room is quiet then and not too crowded. I can look at a poster and decide whether it's newsworthy without the author eagerly asking if I'd like an explanation of the experiment. If I need an explanation, further information, or a quote, I can always come back later, when the author is standing by the poster.
With posters I can easily pull out my digital camera, and in one or two or three photos, I can capture every word and every number. In oral presentations, I need voice recordings plus photos of practically every PowerPoint slide to get the same coverage. And then I have to listen to the recording and look at 30 individual slides.
Most program committees from most medical societies don't scrutinize the abstracts as closely as I believed they did when I was a graduate student. It's simply not true, in most meetings, that the most important studies are presented at oral sessions, and the second-rate studies are consigned to the poster sessions. In fact, I think it's often just the opposite. Many oral presentations are general overviews of a topic (in some meetings this is true of most oral presentations), which is relatively useless when you're looking for actual news. Poster presentations, on the other hand, are more likely to be highly focused reports on a single study.

The Best Unheralded Medical Meeting

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 23:16:00 +0000

As I’ve said before, journalists are pack animals. A small group of medical meetings each attracts hundreds of reporters, because they’re reliable sources of news year after year.

But there’s one meeting I think is better than the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO), the American Heart Association (AHA), and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) put together. For some reason, however, hardly any reporters attend.

It’s the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS), a conference jointly sponsored by the American Pediatric Society, the Society for Pediatric Research, the Ambulatory Pediatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

PAS is a big meeting, attracting thousands of researchers and clinicians. It even has a press room, of a sort, but only a handful of reporters register. Those reporters are both happy and busy; happy because there’s not much competition for terrific stories, and busy because there are so many worthwhile stories that it’s hard to choose.

It’s a four-day meeting, but the time I covered it I only attended three days’ worth. In that time I picked up no fewer than 40 solid news stories. If I had been three people, I could easily have picked up 120. This is no exaggeration.

It’s clearly the major pediatric research meeting of the year, but it’s my impression that more reporters attend the much less interesting annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics. When I covered the AAP meeting I learned, to my surprise, that it’s mostly a CME meeting, with a relatively small proportion of original research presentations.

The PAS meeting, in contrast, is all original research. Just about every talk, and just about every poster presents the results of a clinical trial, and is thus a potential news story.

So why doesn’t the PAS meeting get the respect and the attention from journalists that it deserves? In part, it’s the name, I think. The biggest offender is the word “academic.” If I didn’t know better, I’d think that the meeting involved mostly basic research, with little of interest to physicians or to the general public. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the talks have direct clinical relevance.

The word “pediatric” is the next offender. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that the meeting was solely of interest to pediatricians. In fact, there are papers at this meeting of interest to virtually every medical specialty, from neonatal medicine, to neurology, to infectious diseases, to psychiatry, to child development, to name a few.

The third problem is with the word “societies.” Although I have little evidence to back this up, I’m guessing that the AAP, by far the biggest of the four sponsoring societies, invests more resources in promoting its own annual meeting to the press than the PAS meeting. The other three societies don't have the resources (or perhaps the knowhow) to promote the meeting on their own.

By the way, if you’re a medical journalist, please forget everything you’ve just read. You just keep running with the pack, and I’ll keep all those sweet PAS stories for myself.

The next PAS meeting will be held May 5-8, 2007 in Toronto.

"You are not even legitimate, credentialed press."

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:51:00 +0000

Conference organizers are usually happy—or at least tolerant—when reporters seek to cover a meeting. Sometimes they even treat us like royalty. But sometimes someone behind the registration desk with a Napoleon complex chooses to make things difficult.

Here’s an awful story told by a friend of mine who works for a medical trade paper, which happens to be a small part of a much larger parent company. I’ve changed all identifying details:

"Now's the time to tell you guys about a horrible experience I had a few weeks ago. I was sent to a meeting in [big city]. I arrived very enthusiastic about it because I had in fact asked to go to it. It was about a . . . disorder which my daughter has. My husband and daughter trailed along, also enthusiastically, since this was one of those meetings which has an entirely separate program geared towards patients and families.

"First Mistake: I didn't call ahead of time to confirm that I was welcome. When I showed up at the media registration the secretary's face turned to stone. "OH, you are [Large Parent Company]," she announced grimly. Well, I never introduce myself in such a way, but sure enough, it's written in boldface on my business card and on the letter from [trade paper]. How could I deny it? There was some muttering and heated discussion between the organizers in the back of the room, a couple of hurried cell phone calls, and then she handed over the badge, albeit very reluctantly. I scurried off, anxious to get lost in the crowd before she changed her mind.

"Second Mistake: I relaxed. It was a very stressful meeting to cover because of all the patients who swarmed the docs and made it impossible for me to get close. I flagged one of the meeting room organizers at one point and asked her if she could help me corner a couple of docs. She, at least, was enthusiastic about my presence, even saying "Well, for a reporter, we'll do everything we can to help." NOT!!! Although she successfully re-routed traffic and helped me snatch a few quick words with a couple of docs, I quickly realized I'd have to play catch-up once I got home, so I decided to just concentrate on gathering business cards at every opportunity. Bad Move. I approached my next target, introduced myself, and went on to explain what I was doing. Then, "The Request" for his e-mail address. The secretary who didn't like me reared up from behind him somewhere (they are on the podium and I am several feet below), steam blowing out of her ears. She was furious. "It is absolutely inappropriate for you to be soliciting the speakers. Who are you?" I reminded her who I was and she practically blew her top. "You are not even legitimate, credentialed press."

"I spent several frantic minutes trying to explain to this woman that [my paper’s] stuff is FREE for docs, FREE!!! But no, that part was not heard. I can't tell you how frustrated I was, particularly because, as I said, we have had such familiarity with this disorder in our family, and I KNOW how much lack of awareness there is about it among doctors. This was the main theme of the meeting, and yet they were trying to banish the one reporter who could have addressed that issue!

"I won't bore you with the whole long and confusing story. I stalked her down later and tried, unsuccessfully to get an explanation. I received the cold shoulder from both organizing physicians who wouldn't speak to me on the phone or return my e-mails. I know it's not personal, but it's hard not to be hurt by such rude, unprofessional and hostile behavior. Now I am struggling to write these stories and I am feeling so fed up and discouraged. All I want is an explanation (I believe there is some kind of ongoing dispute between [Big University], which organized the meeting, and [Large Parent Company] )and a sincere apology. Dream on!!

"I found a week or so later [that my editor had talked with the organizers before the meeting]. Weirdly, they had been totally fine with it, so I still do not know what the problem was. It was definitely my connection to [Large Parent Company] that totally spooked the woman, but what scared me was how she managed to poison all her colleagues against me too, and this EVEN before I had managed to contact any of them. Such a horrible feeling of being gagged, silenced, without even the chance to explain yourself. I felt so frustrated that I had been judged so harshly and had no recourse, but I guess that's me taking things WAY too personally. . ."

If any other medical journalists wish to relate funny, horrifying, or instructive stories about conference coverage, I'd be happy to put them here, and I'll keep you anonymous if you wish. Just email them to me at medmeeting(at)gmail(dot)com.

Picking Some Nits with Emma Hitt

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 00:51:00 +0000

Science writer Emma Hitt has written an excellent piece for journalists on meeting coverage called "How to survive--or even enjoy--a medical conference." Her piece originally appeared in ScienceWriters, the newsletter of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), and now it's available in expanded form on her web site.

(By the way, if you're a science or medical journalist, and you're not a member of NASW, you should join immediately. Here's a link to the benefits of membership and here's one to the PDF membership application.)

Emma's article includes a number of fine suggestions. My favorite is,

With regard to covering the presentation itself, the most important piece of advice I have is not to sit through a 3-hour symposium in order to attend a 15-minute presentation. Try to get into the conference hall about 10 minutes before the scheduled presentation. Presentations generally lag behind their scheduled start time anyway, so 10+ minutes of sitting there listening to some presentation in which you have no interest will be more than enough time. On rare occasions, speakers go out of turn and will give their presentation before you show up. This practice should be made illegal. Basically, there's nothing you can do in this situation except try to get all the information you need when you find the speaker later on-if you find the speaker later on-or tell your editor that you've found a much more interesting presentation to cover (importantly, one that has yet to take place).

Naturally, though, I do have a couple of nits to pick with her.

1. In a section on deciding what to cover she writes:

Look through the titles of the big oral sessions (oral presentations are generally more important and contain more mature data than poster presentations) and scour them for words such as "randomized" and "phase III." Any trial that contains hundreds of patients is often newsworthy, especially if it has the word "final results" in the abstract. By contrast, animal studies and phase I trials are generally not newsworthy.

I agree with those final two sentences completely. But I can't let her diss poster presentations at the expense of oral sessions. In fact, I often find poster sessions far more productive than oral sessions, especially the oral "plenary" sessions.

Plenary sessions are usually held in the largest auditorium available, are jam packed with conference attendees, and have at least two huge screens for the PowerPoints and another where a video image of the speaker is projected at ten times life size. All of this is theater, intended to make it appear as if something important is going to happen, when the speaker is actually going to spend three-quarters of his hour going over the history of the field (starting, in many instances, with Hippocrates or Aristotle). During the final 15 minutes the speaker may start talking about his or her own work, but make no mistake, almost none of this will be newsworthy, since it's all old work. It's only during the very last minute that the speaker will talk about the newest stuff, and if it's interesting and newsworthy he or she is likely to say something like, "And if you want to hear the details of this study, come to my poster presentation on Thursday afternoon."

I'm aware of course, that other types of oral presentations can be quite productive for the reporter, particularly the 10-minute brief presentations. It's only the plenaries that I avoid. But it's been my experience that poster sessions are often the most productive part of the meeting. I love poster sessions, and I'll have much more to say about them in future postings.

2. This next one leaves me speechless (well, actually, not really). After explaining that she uses her digital camera to capture each individual PowerPoint slide (a practice I endorse wholeheartedly) Emma writes:

I typically don't take notes except to make a note to myself when something important was said that wasn't included in the abstract or the slides. I also don't record the presentation-the audio tends to sound like an announcement you'd hear in a train station.

No notes and no recording? I'm dumbstruck. Now between paying attention to the presentation and photographing the slides I don't have time to take extensive notes (it would be easier if I had 3 hands and 2 brains), but I do take the time to write down the speaker's name (and his or her title and degree), the general subject of the talk, the size of the study, and the most newsworthy conclusions. After a meeting in which I could easily attend 30 talks or more, how else would I even remember whether any given talk was worth writing about?

And I record everything. While some speakers merely read their PowerPoint slides, most do not. Often they'll explain something beyond what's in the slide, and frequently they'll say something quotable. That's particularly important if it proves difficult, as it often does, to snag them for one-on-one interviews.

I know some reporters who record but take few notes, and I know others who take lots of notes but don't record. But until I read Emma Hitt's article, I thought I didn't know any reporters who neither took notes nor used a recorder.

Excellent but Little Known Medical Conferences

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Finn) — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 22:48:00 +0000

Journalists are pack animals. Where you find one, you tend to find many. This is as true in the world of medical conferences as it is in celebrity coverage.

Hundreds of journalists will register for the big annual meetings such as the American Society for Clinical Oncology, the American Heart Association, and the Radiological Society of North America. Journalists come to these meetings year after year because they’re dependable sources of news on the latest in clinical science.

I cover those big meetings too, but I cover a lot of unheralded meetings as well. I’m the only reporter at the majority of meetings I attend. Many of these meetings are interesting only to physicians within a narrow subspecialty. But many of them have much more general interest, and are productive sources for news of solid clinical advances.

Here’s a list of the meetings I’ve attended within the last five years that were especially productive and at which I was the only reporter, or one of a small handful of reporters. I’ve added a bit of commentary on some of them.

American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (At this meeting I was the only reporter in the room to hear Dr. Park Dietz, the famous forensic psychiatrist, discuss his involvement in the Andrea Yates case, after her first trial but before Dr. Dietz admitted that he had given false testimony on the stand, which earned her a second trial.)
American College of Clinical Pharmacology
American College of Forensic Psychiatry (Excellent for opinion pieces, not so much for news.)
American Headache Society (All the top headache docs in the country, always at a very nice resort.)
American Neuropsychiatric Association
American Psychosomatic Society
Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy
International Gynecologic Cancer Society
NIMH New Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit (Everyone who’s interested in new drug development for mental disorders should attend this conference every year.)
Pediatric Academic Societies (An absolute gold mine, with nuggets for many specialties beyond pediatrics. Far better than the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting, which is mostly CME.)
Sleep Disorders in Infancy and Childhood
Society of Behavioral Medicine (From its title this sounds like a psychiatry or psychology conference, but it really should be seen as an excellent primary care meeting.)
World Congress of Cardiothoracic Surgeons
World Congress on the Insulin Resistance Syndrome