Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 161

Preventive and social medicine
This is not my field, so asking here: is there any real difference between Preventive and social medicine (a new page) and Preventive healthcare? – I can't see one. Thanks, Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 08:23, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Complicating things a bit you also have Social medicine, Public health and Health advocacy (and Medical sociology that looks at healthcare from the outside - Social medicine occassionally engaging in reflexivity from the inside). I suspect preventative might be a bit closer to the disease in question (e.g. "mosquito nets prevent malaria"), while social health will focus more on the sociological (e.g. "Rates of vaccine uptake are lower amongst ethnic groups with a history of abuse by the medical profession, endorsement by members of the community can change this."). I suspect a merge might be in order Talpedia (talk) 12:30, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Considering only the title, I'd guess that PSM is PM + SM, but sometimes it turns out that interdisciplinary fields develop their own methods or distinctive qualities. In other cases, it's just a matter of someone saying "Well, we want to have our own department, and this university doesn't have enough for a PM department or for an SM department, but if we club together, we can form a PSM department..." – which isn't really "a field" at all, but two similar fields being combined for administrative purposes.
 * All of these articles would benefit from links to each other and explanations about how they are similar and different. Sometimes writing such a paragraph helps editors figure out which articles cover the same territory under other names. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:42, 18 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I agree conrtrasting the different topics in the articles is a good starting point. I tried to do this a bit with Medical sociology. Finding sources for this sort of stuff can be quite difficult though, since scholars mostly write within their field, rather than about their (or related) fields. Talpedia (talk) 12:20, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Maybe look for undergraduate textbooks? An introductory chapter might cover that kind of information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:49, 19 June 2022 (UTC)
 * I did a little work on defining various of these terms on public Public health because that seemed like a good place - being the more recognised term. I found a book on the philosophy of population health (another term!), that mentioned Social medicine and discussed population health versus public health. Population health seems to want to get into more general sociological factors and Health equity (and so starts butting up against politics). I looked for some discussion of preventive medicine without much joy. Though one textbook on preventive medicine while not actually defining the term talked about preventive medicine as "the interface between public health and clinical practice", so that would sort of view it as "what practicing doctors do about public health". I mean, I could probably have a look at a Preventive medicine textbook and work out what the correct definition is, but that would be my own OR! Talpedia (talk) 08:23, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
 * You've made great progress already. Thanks for doing this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:33, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
 * The chapter "Population Health:  Definitions, Tensions, and New Directions" by Paula M. Lantz in ISBN 978-1259644511 offers this:  "Preventive medicine is a specialty of medicine practiced by licensed physicians who are devoted to health promotion and disease prevention, and are primarily engaged in preventing rather than curing disease. What constitutes preventive medicine varies within and across countries.  In the U.S. context, preventive medicine is an area of medical practice recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialities with three main specialty areas: aerospace medicine, occupational medicine, and public health and general preventive medicine."
 * A later chapter offers this:  "Preventive medicine, represented in light blue, uses the modalities of lifestyle medicine and conventional medicine to treat individual patients, but with a primary focus on prevention and health promotion. Preventive medicine is also the only discipline in this group with a major emphasis on population health."
 * Perhaps one of those would be useful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:13, 23 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that source. I found this paper https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2016.10.037, which is is a little argumentative but addresses the general question of what the various definitions are how they relate and echoes some of the points from that source. I've updated the Public health a little to discuss preventive medicine, health equity and lifestyle medicine. Based on this. I'm not sure what the relationship between preventive medicine and Preventive healthcare is...
 * I still need to flesh out the relationship between social medicine and population health. I'm not quite sure to do about the various other articles that could be considered "related" to one another, e.g. Social medicine, Lifestyle medicine, Preventive and social medicine. I was thinking linking through to the related fields section of public health with something like "is one of the fields used to further public health".
 * Talpedia (talk) 11:18, 26 June 2022 (UTC)
 * It's always a good idea to Build the web to related subjects.
 * Perhaps preventive medicine is "the field of studying whether to check everyone's blood pressure" and preventive healthcare is "actually checking everyone's blood pressure"? We probably need an article focusing on the second one more than an article on the first, because we probably have a lot of articles that say things like "Primary care providers offer preventive healthcare". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:15, 26 June 2022 (UTC)

Paraphrasing DSM and ICD criteria
Hey, I've been around for a couple of months at WikiProject Psychology, and it's come to my attention that the DSM-3, DSM-4, DSM-5, ICD-10 and ICD-11 copyrights don't allow verbatim copies of diagnostic criteria for Wikipedia purposes. So I've gone through and found some articles for which this is an issue at this list and I'm planning to paraphrase them so we have less risk of getting another notice like  this one. My goal is to paraphrase the criteria and not to remove content from them.

There are some popular articles in the list I've made, and also some fairly obscure ones. I'm thinking of starting from the bottom of the list I've made, which is mostly the more obscure ones, just giving a heads up and open to any feedback about doing this. Also, I think it might be worth mentioning this explicitly in WP:MEDMOS because it is so common; WP:MEDCOPY currently does a poor job of stating explicitly against verbatim copies from the ICD and DSM diagnostic criteria.

You can read more about this on my talk page here. Darcyisverycute (talk) 08:19, 27 June 2022 (UTC)


 * Hmm, it feels like fair use should apply here legally (and WP:COPYQUOTE should apply within wikipedia). Should we really be humoring the DSM's and ICD's abuse of copyright law. However, looking through Darcyisverycute's talk page there seem to be some prior discussion about this though, and perhaps it isn't my decision whether wikipedia wants to get sued... Copyright problems/2010 March 9. Talpedia (talk) 11:59, 27 June 2022 (UTC)
 * The difficulty with fair use in this instance is that what looks like (and probably would be) fair use on a single page is not necessarily fair use when the volume of quotations is considered across the entire website. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:02, 27 June 2022 (UTC)


 * "DSM-5® is a registered trademark, and all of its content is protected by copyright held by the American Psychiatric Association. All rights are reserved, and written permission is required from the American Psychiatric Association for use in any way, commercial or noncommercial." - APA Permissions, Licensing, and Reprints


 * ICD-11 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 IGO license (CC BY-ND 3.0 IGO). Mark D Worthen PsyD (talk) [he/him] 04:08, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that about the ICD-11, my mistake. This is what I saw about ICD-10 copyright for reference: Darcyisverycute (talk) 04:22, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Re ICD-10: we've talk page post claiming WHO has permitted WP to "present ICD-10". If you'd rather err on the side of caution; the glossary terms from Chapter V should be OK, as ICD-10-CM (the US adaptation of ICD-10) is in the public domain. I don't think there is a PD adaption of the blue or green books though. Little pob (talk) 11:47, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * I suggest we get an opinion on use of that license from . Sandy Georgia (Talk)  11:56, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * Normally, a "-ND" licence isn't suitable for Wikipedia. -- Colin°Talk 12:05, 28 June 2022 (UTC)
 * CC BY-ND 3.0 IGO is not a compatible license, because it does not allow derivative works, and our license does. — Diannaa (talk) 13:19, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

Please give input on drugs.com as a MEDRS-compliant source
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#drugs.com_for_MEDRS

Thank you 50.45.170.185 (talk) 17:53, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Lavender oil has an RFC
Lavender oil, which is within the scope of this WikiProject, has an RFC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. 50.45.170.185 (talk) 01:52, 30 June 2022 (UTC)


 * These are related discussions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:00, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

Acronyms (or abbreviations) for viruses
Recently, I noticed all of these acronyms or abbreviations (I'll just call them acronyms) added to articles about viruses. This is a pretty big deal in my opinion. I have no idea why there would be a need to add these acronyms. None of them are cited. And I have not sen any use of them outside of the wikipedia articles.

For instance:
 * Monkeypox virus has THREE acronyms- MPV, MPXV, and hMPXV
 * In the same article, it lists variola (VARV), cowpox (CPX), and vaccinia (VACV)
 * Influenza A virus has the acronym IAV
 * Human alphaherpesvirus 1 has the acronym HHV-1 which is not in bold like the others

In everyone of these articles, the acronym IS NEVER USED AGAIN! What is the point? This is just getting ridiculous. There is no need to add these useless acronyms that the average reader would not use. I checked WP:MEDMOS. There was nothing in there about writing these acronyms.

I just checked the articles Norovirus and Rabies virus. Neither of them have an acronym.

What do y'all think about this? Sneasel talk 04:58, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Abbreviations and acronyms are covered by MOS:ABBR – there is probably little MOS:MED could add that wouldn't attract claims of WP:CREEP.
 * For time reasons I've only looked at your first bullet point; a quick Google shows MPXV is used, hMPVX is for use,; but that MPV is actually an abbreviation of Metapneumovirus.
 * Initially I thought it may have been a typo of MPX (also in use). Except it was added as an abbreviation of monkeypox to the MPV dab page
 * Given it's already used for another virus; WP:MEDRS are probably not going to be using MPV for monkeypox. As such, I until such time that they do (if ever). Little pob (talk) 12:15, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I think it's a good idea to have (real) abbreviations for viruses in the article about the virus. That suggests that Monkeypox virus gets "MPXV", but does not mention VARV, CPX, or VACV. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:19, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Spinal decompression could use a review
Spinal decompression seems to discuss this only as "a procedure intended to relieve pressure on the spinal cord or on one or more compressed nerve roots passing through or exiting the spinal column".

Is any other information about spinal decompression appropriate for that article?

(Please add to the article - don't just comment here.)

- 2804:14D:5C59:8693:2554:EFF5:D672:C520 (talk) 22:37, 3 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Found a 2021 meta-analysis discussing efficacy of non-surgical management in the form of physio, so had a quick poke. Little pob (talk) 12:04, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

Rename/move article Tetrahydrobiopterin
I proposed a rename of tetrahydrobiopterin to sapropterin to use the INN. --Whywhenwhohow (talk) 04:54, 25 June 2022 (UTC)
 * commented--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 19:31, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

Palliative treatment vs care
Talk:Symptomatic treatment appears to be a proposal to change the Palliative treatment redirect, which currently points to Palliative care, so that it will instead point to Symptomatic treatment. Please comment over there. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:11, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Reliability of Kinesiology Review?
Profile at ResearchGate, can this source be considered reliable to use under MEDRS? I am considering this piece in question. X-750 Rust In Peace... Polaris 09:26, 6 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Is that even in PubMed? Looks suspiciously like a fringe venue for proponents of this kind of product to talk to each other. Alexbrn (talk) 09:34, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * No,, it's ISSN is not catalogued in PubMed's journal list, however searching for their ISSN brings up several of their articles. The journal is published by the American Kinesiology Association, it's ISSN is 2163-0453. It's Resurchify profile may give you more details, if you'd like to ascertain the reliability of the publication. X-750 Rust In Peace... Polaris 09:53, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * We need respectable WP:FRIND sources for fringe topics. This is of no use. Alexbrn (talk) 11:22, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * On the more general subject, I'm doubtful about this sentence in the lead: "There is no good medical evidence that the Feldenkrais method confers any health benefits."
 * Feldenkrais may be selling a fairy tale about re-training nerves, but gentle exercise of any kind confers the health benefits of gentle exercise. This statement seems as scientifically untenable as the marijuana folks saying that smoke of all kinds causes lung cancer, except for smoking marijuana, which they claimed for years could never cause lung cancer.  (Reminds me of the story put out by tobacco companies, which used to say that cigarettes "strengthened" the lungs.)  We don't have to buy their story, but we also shouldn't be accepting sentences that suggest it doesn't make any difference whether you spend your day doing gentle exercises or plopped in front of a television. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:29, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * On the source cited in the lead, I am unable to locate any archived or online version of the cited source, but the laysummary uses the phrase "effectiveness for the improvement of health outcomes". Sandy Georgia (Talk)  15:53, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * That's kind of what I was getting at, I understand the inherent bias (or whatever Guy Macon was getting at in his long tirade) against alternative medicine, but I don't like the absolutism present, it strikes me as a subtle violation of NPOV... X-750 Rust In Peace... Polaris 20:47, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Just to be clear, the ludicrous text about "re-organizing connections" is not from Feldenkrais, it's from a skeptic. A description from someone with Feldenkrais experience would be rejected as promotional. - Palpable (talk) 00:31, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * It might be better to look at books than journal articles. This one suggests that it could be helpful, but the main problem is "unrealistic" and "inappropriate expectations", especially where desperate parents are concerned.  Chapter 20 in this book starts with a long list of influences, such as Gestalt psychology and martial arts.  This one says that it's not meant to treat any specific disease.  This book has a section that says, among other things, that it's "not so different from physical therapy" but "closer to yoga".  From the descriptions, there is a good deal of "Doctor, it hurts when I do this – So don't do that (do this other thing instead)" involved. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:31, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Sideline
The publication above is I'll note that registrant for is 'Human Kinetics', and they have many other journals (you can search with that DOI link, or check out WikiProject_Academic_Journals/Journals_cited_by_Wikipedia/DOI/10.1100 under '10.1123)'. If those are bunk, I can easily update WP:UPSD to flag them according to how dubious those are. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:45, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Multimorbdity article
Dear All,

As part of my residency at the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), I have organised an edit-a-thon focusing on multimorbidity. With the participants we significantly reworked and expanded the article. Please have a look and let me know what you think. Also, apologies for doing the whole change in one edit.

Best, Adam Harangozó (NIHR WiR) (talk) 10:48, 5 July 2022 (UTC)
 * thank you for posting--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:18, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

MedRS question at Talk:Menarche
Over at Talk:Menarche: there is an editor querying some of the better source needed and primary source inline tags within the article. As neither a medical professional or a researcher, I always feel WP:INCOMPETENT (specifically that second bullet point) to answer such questions beyond pointing people to WP:MEDRS. Can someone else take the time to have a look and respond to their questions? Thanks Little pob (talk) Little pob (talk) 14:33, 7 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Thanks for this note. I've replied there.   WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:58, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Please help with Ketotic hypoglycemia
Ketotic hypoglycemia - the entry paragraph is wrecked. Help needed from someone with expertise in this topic. --CopperKettle (talk) 04:00, 6 July 2022 (UTC)
 * should help..--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 17:14, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Reuse/adaptation of a graphic in a journal article?
Hi all, me again. This Nature article contains an extremely useful infographic (Fig 1.) that details the specifics of the differences in immune response between men and women from in-utero (I didn't even know that was possible) to old age. My question is, how do I incorporate this into Sex differences in human physiology, do we need to file some sort of form with the Rightslink Copyright Clearance Center? I don't think copying it word for word in a table form would be permissible either considering it's copyrighted & not released under any form of Creative Commons license... Thank you all again for your help. X-750 Rust In Peace... Polaris 20:52, 6 July 2022 (UTC)


 * The "graphic" parts of the infographic are mostly decorative, so that could be omitted. You could ask for advice at Media copyright questions, but since @Marchjuly is the only person who has answered questions there recently, we might as well ping him here.  You could also try Requesting copyright permission from the authors.  There is a process involving the Volunteer Response Team for the authors to document their agreement via e-mail (and possibly through other means).   WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:37, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Alright, I'll wait for a response from Marchjuly. Roughly, how would the procedure with the VRT proceed? X-750 Rust In Peace... Polaris 10:39, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I believe that the process is something like the authors need to send an e-mail message from a provable e-mail address (e.g., name@employer.edu) that says "I own the copyright on , and I agree to license for use in Wikipedia according to " (or perhaps sometimes "this bit is so small that I agree it's not really copyrightable"). Then a volunteer has to check that it seems reasonable, and post a statement about the permission on wiki. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:03, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I follow you. How do we initiate the contact with the authors though? Do I send an email to the authors with that template at WP:COPYREQ? X-750 Rust In Peace... Polaris 20:44, 7 July 2022 (UTC)
 * E-mail is probably best. If you look towards the end of the paper, there is a section called "Corresponding author" with the e-mail address for one of them.  I'd start the message with like "I'm one of the volunteers at the English Wikipedia, and I'd like your permission to copy a table from your recent paper in ".  You could give them a link to your user page as well.  (Also, before you do that, do you have a dedicated e-mail address for Wikipedia?  If you don't want to out yourself, then you don't really want to send e-mail from an e-mail address with your real name.)
 * There are lots of sample e-mail messages at Example requests for permission, but I think they are kind of on the old side. I don't think that we really need to tell people what Wikipedia is these days. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:06, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

FA reviewer needed for Bacteria
Bacteria has received two "Satisfactory" notations at WP:URFA/2020A and we are looking for a third reviewer to ensure this article still meets the FA criteria. Can someone review the URFA/2020 instructions and make a notation indicating if it still meets the FA standards? Feel free to ping me if you have any questions. Thanks, Z1720 (talk) 16:35, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

Xenocatabolism
Xenocatabolism has been around for quite a while and I'm not sure whether it's alternative medicine, hoax, fringe or something else entirely... Stuartyeates (talk) 00:45, 3 July 2022 (UTC)


 * I think it might be a Transhumanism thing, or a "I'm sure there's a bacteria/fungi that will eat plastic; we just have to find it (and hope it won't destroy the world)" thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:07, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Whatever it is, it wouldn't survive an AfD. AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:27, 3 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Yep, that's problematic. Redirect to Aubrey de Grey (and then clean that article up, too). TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:03, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Actually, poking around some more, we have a lot of de Gray-related material that could use some review. Xenocatabolism. Longevity escape velocity. Ending Aging. Strategies for engineered negligible senescence (SENS). SENS Research Foundation. Methuselah Foundation.... de Grey has done rather well for himself making very grandiose claims about the near-future potential of anti-aging research. He's very good at providing soundbite quotes that make their way into Wikipedia articles on aging, even though he's not necessarily seen as the most credible person by working scientists. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:17, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
 * It sounds like we have several candidates for Merging. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:23, 3 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Those all sound like great ideas. Alas I can't do any because I'm topic banned from BLP, so I'll leave it to you. Stuartyeates (talk) 09:45, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I have tagged Xenocatabolism for merging to Aubrey de Grey. The discussion is at Talk:Aubrey de Grey. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:02, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * While I agree that "Xenocatabolism" is not separately notable, lemmata like "Longevity escape velocity" and "Strategies for engineered negligible senescence" certainly are. The still small, but ever-growing field of anti-aging movement is receiving increasing news coverage. De Grey is a huge face of the movement, therefore it should be no surprise that quite a few articles on this matter refer to him. As long as an article is notable, neutral (resp. balanced) and verifiable, I can't see any problem with that. Aquarius3500 (talk) 17:09, 9 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Making the right choice for any given topic always requires editors to use their best judgment. Sometimes we think it's better to have a bunch of stubs, and sometimes we think it's better to give readers everything in one place.  I don't think that anyone is advocating for a one-size-fits-all approach. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:08, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

Reviewer wanted
I have Rupert Downes up for review at Featured article candidates/Rupert Downes/archive2. Downes was a renowned Australian soldier, surgeon and historian who wrote part of the World War I medical history volume on the Sinai and Palestine campaign. Anyone who drops by with a review or just a few words would be most welcome. Hawkeye7  (discuss)  06:02, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Achondroplasia COI edit requests


Hi! I've posted some COI edit requests at Talk:Achondroplasia. Sharing in case anyone here is interested in taking a look. Thank you for any help or feedback! Mary Gaulke (talk) 13:44, 14 July 2022 (UTC)


 * @MaryGaulke, you've posted 16 separate changes. Have you experimented with making smaller requests?  Maybe post a couple of them on one day, and then a few more after the first few are processed? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:12, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I've found that different reviewers have different preferences here, but many like to know the full scope of the requests from the outset rather than having them shared gradually. In cases where one round of requests will impact the next, I've done multiple rounds, but given the length of the edit request queue right now, I'm hesitant to post just a few items, wait months for a review, and then start over with the next few. Open to any feedback on that, though. Thanks for the reply! Mary Gaulke (talk) 16:30, 14 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree w/ WAID(make smaller requests)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 01:24, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
 * The COI requests queue isn't processed in a first-come, first-served fashion. I'm guessing that long/complex requests are more likely to be quietly skipped. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:54, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

Sourcing needed on tattoo-related articles
I would love help with improving the quality of medical information in the following articles: Health effects of tattoos, Process of tattooing, Tattoo removal, Tattoo ink, and UV tattoo. These articles have a lot of biomedical information without sufficient high-quality sourcing. Dreamyshade (talk) 00:42, 16 July 2022 (UTC)


 * @Dreamyshade, have you found any good sources yet? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:15, 16 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Can you clarify? I've been able to find good sources while working on sections of these articles - for example, I've been working on Tattoo ink, and I was able to find sources for the existing information. I also found several other sources for improving that article, including this review article and this article, and I'm hoping to work through them for adding citations to other parts of the article. It's slow work for me because I'm not familiar with the field, and I'm not experienced in finding or using medical sources. That's ok, I just would like other people to get involved as well, including to check my work. Dreamyshade (talk) 01:20, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

spacers
They're not only used in asthma. Proposed move. Dr. Vogel (talk) 15:33, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
 * commented--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:53, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Use of controlled clinical terminology
I am surprised that the info box template for disease doesn’t have a section for SNOMED-CT and ICD-10. These would be helpful tremendously in using the resultant Wikidata as well as being helpful for those sort of people who use ICD-10 and SNOMED-CT.

Ditto for signs & symptoms.

There is also a strong case for use of SNOMED-CT to identify procedures, anatomic locations, diagnostic studies, drugs, and so on.

There is a URL representation of SNOMED-CT (including both concept model attributes, as well as “unapproved” attributes which could be very helpful in representation of knowledge (vs. intensionally defining a concept).

For a host of reasons there is a need for a curated, peer reviewed basic knowledge representation for some really basic use cases. e.g. “pathological process” CAUSES “disease”, “disease” HAS MANIFESTATION “clinical finding”, “drug” TREATS “disease”, etc.

I am delighted to work on this, and can probably even churn out some useful content (from SNOMED chiefly, but can also supply mappings to ICD-10, recognizing that ICD-10 is a gross simplification and at best a classification scheme but should ‘’’NEVER’’’ be used for clinical use as it is too ambiguous and imprecise. Yes, I know, commercial EHR systems do it all the time, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a profoundly bad idea.  And don’t even get me started on ICD-10-CM…). DrKC MD (talk) 06:45, 17 July 2022 (UTC)


 * @DrKC MD, that information is usually in Medical resources, which is placed in ==External links== at the end of the page. It used to be in the infoboxes, but the list got kind of long and confusing, especially when we started adding lay-friendly summary contents (like the relevant specialty), so we moved the links off to a separate template. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:48, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
 * As a side note, the ICD codes are something that has a specific, niche audience that we know about through comments on social media: Medical coders sometimes use Wikipedia to find codes for unfamiliar conditions and procedures (presumably if they can't find something through a more definitive source). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:50, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

Ectopic pregnancy
Just a heads up, last night I had to revert an edit to the article about ectopic pregnancy to remove a NPOV-violating screed about how terminating an ectopic is totally not an abortion.

Whilst, depending on the definitions you use, termination of an ectopic pregnancy may not technically be an abortion, this is besides the point that the standard treatment for ectopic pregnancy is still termination; there is a worrying trend outside the encyclopedia, especially since the Dobbs draft leaked, to make excuses for the draconian abortion laws that are now coming into effect across America and causing a major chilling effect for obstetricians (leading, in turn, to more Savita Halappanavars).

It's especially important right now that the encyclopedia not be used to disseminate medical misinformation, so it would be nice for some more knowledgeable eyes to keep an eye on articles relating to pregnancy. Sceptre (talk) 14:46, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
 * A meta-obervation. Years ago I took a decision not to edit any WP:AP2-related articles, because it was not likely to be a gainful activity. But AP2 is infecting everything, not least medical topics. It is profoundly depressing. The WP:PAGs are up to the job of defending against bad edits, but the amount of needless drama is increasing. Alexbrn (talk) 15:22, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Ugh, the pedant in me demands that this is not necessarily an attept to spread misinformation, but an attempt to split up the definition of termination so that there is a category X of "necessarily termination" and a category Y (to be called abortion). The aim is to render everything in Y immoral, by putting everything else in X such that Y can be considered "essentially immoral". This is a common process in law where previous precedent is ignored through claiming your new case is sui generis. The misinformation (should it exists) would lie in claiming that this new unusual definition is commonly used, or wilfully encouraging people to fall into fallacious reasoning through Conflation of the new concept Y with the broader meaning of abotion. A reasonable argument would be that wikipedia should use the definition of the term used by medics.
 * It's worth noting that the game of generality tweking isn't an exclusive preserve of pro-life groups. I am highly suspicious that the definition of abortion as "termination of a pregnancy where a fetus has implanted" used by medics may have evolved to exclude certain forms of birth control (though that would require a good deal of reading) and there is a clear incentive for pro-choice groups to interpret abortion as broadly as possible to extend the "moral justification" or necessary abortion to the practice as a whole.
 * As to what this means for editing? I'm not so sure. Courts and newspapers will probably proceed to push term Y, and then editors will try to cite it. Other editors will try to use WP:MEDRS to keep these sources out of the article. I am unsure if our editorial powers extend to talking about Y as "an abortion that protects the health of the expectant mother, which the source calls an abortion". After sufficient time there will be academic sources that comment on Y, X and the term "abortion". Talpedia (talk) 17:38, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Of course, the eventual end-goal of these people is that — as the now-famous op-ed goes – the only moral abortion will be their abortion (or, indeed, their mistresses'). There's a significant amount of winners' regret going around now, to the point where major pro-life 501(c)(3)s are going to Congress and testifying that a child rape victim terminating her pregnancy isn't an abortion. But Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and we do not and must not censor medical fact to help right-wing culture warriors sleep better at night. Sceptre (talk) 18:00, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Hmm. I'm not quite sure it medical fact though. There is a "social fact" about what medics call abortion. I guess there are a series of facts that argue and conclude that the state of an embryo implanted in the uterus is similar to one implanted elsewhere such that the procedure to terminate an ectopic pregnancy is the same as abortion - but then a medic will also tell you that preventing implantation of a fertilized egg through use of a morning after pill is also not abortion. Such interpretations leave room for an argument than termination of an ectopic pregnancy is different because the fetus has not implanted in the uterus. We should, nevertheless, be clear about the terms we use and prefer the terms in use in most current scholarly works. Talpedia (talk) 18:23, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Like I said in the OP, you can argue in good faith whether termination of an ectopic pregnancy is abortion, but these people aren't arguing in good faith; I don't know how you can reconcile the belief that preventing implantation (with something like Plan B) is abortion but terminating a fertilised ovum post-implantation isn't, after all.
 * But one thing we can agree on is that if a ten-year-old child gets pregnant and crosses state lines to terminate her pregnancy, that is an abortion, no matter how much special pleading the forced birth brigade engage in. It's not 2012 any more; we don't have to pretend that in cases of legitimate rape, the female body has all sorts of ways to shut that whole thing down. Sceptre (talk) 19:42, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
 * I mean to me lots of this is a game with words. My only position here is to recognise that a lot of this discussion is a game with words, and we should make sure we don't get sucked into such games.
 * You cannot, you could however argue that ectopic pregnancy and plan b are equivalent and distinct from other forms of termination at a scientific (rather than moral) level. I personally think such a distinction aren't that relevant scientifically or morally. But this gets into WP:FORUM territory, the point here was mostly pedantry, but also to note that "politically or procedurally useful" distinctions is perhaps a feature of medicine itself as well as recent US politics. Talpedia (talk) 19:59, 17 July 2022 (UTC)
 * There is a "social fact" about what medics call abortion.
 * Yes. Also, it has changed, and we've not done a great job of keeping up with the changing language.  To whomever removed that old note at the top of Abortion that cited ob/gyn textbooks claiming that miscarriages are called abortions:  Thank you.  I think the solution used there (i.e., to point people to Definitions of abortion) is a good one, and might be helpful in all of the disputes about whether _____ is technically an abortion.
 * Articles like Ectopic pregnancy could certainly get a paragraph on people (not just in the US) being afraid that anti-abortion laws will result in medically unsound management of ectopic pregnancies. It should not, however, say that any US location actually has such stupid laws unless and until we have an WP:EXTRAORDINARY source to support the claim that such a law actually exists. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:49, 17 July 2022 (UTC)

WikiProject Vital Articles reboot
The WikiProject Vital Articles has now being recently revamped and welcoming new members. On our Vital article list, the WikiProject Medicine has plenty of articles that both projects can work together in the Health, medicine and disease section, such as Injury, Drug, and Medicine itself. Please do consider joining our project too! CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 04:45, 15 July 2022 (UTC)
 * thanks for posting--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 01:30, 19 July 2022 (UTC)

Dietary acid load
New article: Dietary acid load. Looks like synthesis promoting fad diets to me - see also Alkaline diet (alternative medicine), where this nonsense seems to have been started. AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:20, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
 * [pH] Levels above 7.45 are referred to as acidosis and levels below 7.35 as alkalosis. – not off to a great start. TompaDompa (talk) 14:45, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Alzheimer's research controversy
Please read all of Talk:Sylvain Lesné and Sylvain Lesné and Talk:Alzheimer's disease on Lesne, and sources, lest we jump the gun. Particularly please read my urges for caution, to avoid a WP:NOTNEWS issue of getting too far ahead on this breaking story. Where do we put a description of Aβ*56 ?? Does that belong at a) amyloid at b) amyloid beta or at c) amyloid hypothesis? My suspicion is b), but not a neuroscientist. And I can't write that content even if I know where to put it; for now, I have temporarily set up the very awkward amyloid beta star 56 as a redirect to Lesne. Some sources are comparing this to the Wakefield fraud, but my hunch is that is hyperbole, so we need to take it slow (and see what develops over the next few days in major US news outlets). Sandy Georgia (Talk)  16:12, 24 July 2022 (UTC)


 * PS, this may turn out to be much more of a story about one person's alleged fraud than the newsy hype (piggy backing on the aducanumab scandal) that this one protein is so significant in AD research. It's bad news for Ashe, bad news for Lesné, bad news for US taxpayers, bad news for University of Minnesota, but may be a flash in the pan for the big picture on the amyloid hypothesis and the overall Alzheimer's research.  I recommend reading the commentary on the alzforum thread, linked in the Notes section. Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  16:37, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Interesting but depressing: Systematic reviews aren't good at dealing with retracted papers
https://www.jclinepi.com/article/S0895-4356(22)00166-4/fulltext

Talpedia (talk) 11:33, 22 July 2022 (UTC)
 * interesting, and unfortunately true--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 00:35, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Positioning of Template:Medical resources
Revisiting a 2017 RfC: should the WP:MED template medical resources should be in an external links section? Please join the discussion over at Template talk:Medical resources. Little pob (talk) 19:20, 21 July 2022 (UTC)
 * commented--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:06, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Hot articles
I don't know if any of you are watching WikiProject Medicine/Hot articles, but if you like knowing what's interesting to editors, then it's a good page to keep track of. You can transclude it on any page (like we did in the ==Metrics== section of WP:MED) like this:

Transclusions auto-update without causing an edit to the page, so if you put it on your talk page or some other page that you visit frequently, you can see what's happening but not have an extra item in your watchlist every day. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:57, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Lethargy and fatigue
Back in 2018, proposed merging lethargy into fatigue. Lethargy is barely a stub and repeats much of what fatigue says, but as I am no medical expert I don't want to redirect or merge without first trying to start a discussion here. I encourage any interested parties to see Talk:Lethargy. Cheers, Anarchyte  ( talk ) 13:41, 27 July 2022 (UTC)
 * commented--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 02:06, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust


Hello!

I am writing to inform about a tool that is currently in development, and is possibly interesting for WikiProject Medicine members.

Hacks/Hackers, along with its project partners, announces the Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust (ARTT). ARTT aims to provide motivated citizens with tools and resources to discuss vaccine efficacy online. ARTT provides these connectors with expert guidance in analyzing information online and in responding to others through trust-building ways.

In theory, ARTT users would engage with the tool when seeking guidance on how to respond to vaccine misinformation online. The tool would suggest resources that have been vetted for quality and reliability in hopes of encouraging productive dialogue.

During the first research phase for this project, Wikipedians have been asked to provide feedback on potential uses for the tool within Wikipedia. For example, could a tool that vets sources be used to improve articles? Furthermore, could articles themselves be elevated to the point at which they could be recommended by the tool as reliability sources?

Hacks/Hackers and Wikimedia DC invites you to contribute to this conversation using ARTT’s Meta page. Netha  (talk)  14:04, 24 July 2022 (UTC)
 * thank you for post--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:56, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

XKCD on proxy variables
I think that many of you will appreciate this: https://xkcd.com/2652/ WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:57, 1 August 2022 (UTC)

New articles on inner and middle ear conditions
Inner ear decompression sickness and Middle ear barotrauma could use a quick check over by ENT expert, and maybe someone well familiar with medical categories, Template:Medical resources, and medical infoboxes. Cheers &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 09:17, 3 August 2022 (UTC)

People "afflicted" with disease?
A disagreement about MOS:EUPH's recommendation that Wikipedia should describe people as "afflicted", see: Please comment there, not here. Alexbrn (talk) 13:16, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * WT:WTW

Discussion on how to describe the impacts of the 2022 Monkeypox Outbreak on the MSM community
Inviting additional editors with experience editing medical articles to contribute to the discussion here  &#123;{u&#124;  Gtoffoletto  &#125;}  talk 19:47, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * commented--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:57, 5 August 2022 (UTC)

Featured Article Save Award for Enzyme inhibitor
There is a Featured Article Save Award nomination at Wikipedia talk:Featured article review/Enzyme inhibitor/archive1 for User:Boghog. Please join the discussion to recognize and celebrate editors who helped assure this article would retain its featured status. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  03:02, 6 August 2022 (UTC)

Unpaywall – Find free versions of paywalled articles instantly
Don't shower, skip the grocery shopping; run over to unpaywall.org right now and install the browser extension Unpaywall for Firefox, Chrome, and (inserting my plug here for the best browser out there :) Vivaldi—you won't regret it. Either Unpaywall is the best kept secret out there, or you're all using it already and I am the very last one to find out. This is going to save me untold amounts of time searching around for that elusive, free version of an article which comes up first as an abstract with paywalled links if you want to read the article. If there's a free version out there, Unpaywall will find it, and it sticks a little open padlock icon right onto the paywalled page, and all you have to do it click it, and voila! No more searching around anymore. Techcrunch review here.

If you're an eagle-eyed reader of WT:MED, you may recall that this isn't the first time someone has mentioned Unpaywall. Back in January, Ajpolino quietly snuck it into this discussion, but it deserves more of a giant billboard that you can't drive by without seeing, so here ya go. Mathglot (talk) 20:07, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
 * installed, thank you--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 15:37, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Cool. I've been using Bypass Paywalls Clean as an extension for newspaper websites. It doesn't defeat the hard paywalls but handles the ones that say "you've reached your limit of X articles a month" or otherwise nag you to subscribe. I should add that if you do regularly read a quality newspaper then please do subscribe. This is more for when you come across an article on some other random news site. -- Colin°Talk 10:11, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Psychiatry: Edit warring about uncited footnote talking about "blood ritual"
Hey, an IP keeps on reverting people's reverts to add a footnote about blood rituals without cites. They've said I'm edit warring... so I should probably get some other people involved. I'll do one final revert and leave it to others. Talpedia (talk) 07:44, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I've made an entry on the talk page, I think the ball is with the IP now to make a case for inclusion. |→ Spaully ~talk~ 09:20, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Very bizarre. The IP user continued to reinstate the same "blood ritual" stuff so is now banned for edit warring. |→ Spaully ~talk~ 12:35, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm surprised that there isn't more disruptive editing in that article. It hasn't been under even WP:SEMI protection for about 7 years now. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:36, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Asking for help on Crystal-storing histiocytosis
Over at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal-storing_histiocytosis someone has edited without adding sources for their additions. Normally, I'd just revert, but the person is a patient with the disorder. Does the project have some good wording for how to handle that sort of situation? Red Fiona (talk) 20:51, 6 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Those edits need some work. I reverted one, which looked a bit like a mistake.  Let's see what happens. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:07, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks - I wasn't sure what to do. Red Fiona (talk) 15:53, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * If we're lucky, we'll be able to turn this Very Interested Person into a good editor. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:49, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * So far, I've learned that we had been mispresenting a (somewhat confusingly worded) source in that article, to say that CSH patients sometimes have yellow skin, when it should have said the tumors are sometimes yellowish. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:08, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

Lagoon
Can anyone explain or define "lagoon" in The diagnosis is based on the clinical appearance of the lesions. Examination with a dermatoscope shows characteristic red, purple, or blue-black lagoons. in article Cherry angioma? &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 14:12, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
 * ..Lacunae also known as lagoons--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:11, 12 August 2022 (UTC) ( Note-while this is via subscription, the actual question is answered in the free preview Science Direct offers )

Wikimania starts Thursday
You can still register for Wikimania. Attendance is free. This (mostly) virtual event will use a virtual event website called pheedloop.com These sessions may interest some of you:


 * wikimania:2022:Submissions/Don't cite it, write it! What professors think about Wikipedia
 * wikimania:2022:Submissions/Responsible community governance: Equity and access to mental health information on Wikimedia projects
 * wikimania:2022:Submissions/Seeking new strategies of engagement: the benefits of science communicators on Wikipedia

WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:38, 9 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Signing up requires an e-mail address. That e-mail address does not have to be connected to your Wikipedia account, but please put your username down as either your name or nickname in the registration materials (the form asks for first+last+nickname), so we'll recognize you! WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:41, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the heads up. All three of those are topics I'm interested in. I'll try not too be too much of a troll regarding the last two... though I think I've expressed by concerns surrounding these sort ideas on this page a few times! Although... I'm not sure if by spanish is up to the science communication talk... Talpedia (talk) 18:43, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * BTW: If you're hoping to use the live interpretation to listen to sessions (they're doing the UN languages + a couple), that's what the large but irrelevant-looking gray pictures in the middle of each session page is about.  I've not yet been able to find out if the interpretations are recorded for viewing later, but the original sessions are all on YouTube. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:29, 12 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The talk with the professors was quite fun... and I only got reminded about the code of conduct once ＼(^▽^ )ノ Talpedia (talk) 00:14, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Consensus
Consensus is a new commercial company that is providing machine learning question answering (QA) across academic journals. This came up as a possible feature from the ARTT people and facebook have been doing something similar for their fact checking tool, though in both these cases I think a third party corpus of sources is used rather than the body of academic literature.

Anyway, editors might like to give consensus a whirl for finding relevant sources. WhatamIdoing suggested that this sort of tool might be combined with the WP:Citation_Hunt tool for those with gnomeish tendencies. The tool is free by invite only at the moment; I requested an invite and got one within a week or so. Talpedia (talk) 23:29, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

Talpedia (talk) 23:29, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

CZ Biohub Infobox Updates
Hello! I'm here on behalf of Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a nonprofit that partners with universities to advance medical science, developing new diagnostic processes, therapies, and cures. If you would like to read my full conflict of interest disclosure, you can do so by visiting my user page.

I have a small ask for any curious editors at this WikiProject: would you mind reviewing an edit request I posted to CZ Biohub's Talk page? It's a pair of updates that add a logo and a purpose line to the page's infobox. Due to my COI, I can't edit the article directly and need independent editors to approve my suggestions. If anyone could help me out with this, I would really appreciate it. Thanks! Patricia at GMMB (talk) 13:54, 11 August 2022 (UTC)


 * It looks like User:Ptrnext added the logo a month ago. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:39, 11 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Hi User:WhatamIdoing! Yes, you're right that User:Ptrnext added the logo, thank you for pointing that out. I was also looking to add a purpose line, which many organizations similar to CZ Biohub have in their infoboxes. Would you mind helping with that? Patricia at GMMB (talk) 18:05, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The suggested "purpose" sounds spammy to me, so I won't add it. I'm not convinced that it's necessary anyway. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:00, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Intravenous
Items Q640448 and Q1369403 seem to overlap or cover the same or similar topics. Could a WikiProject member please look into this, and check whether they should be merged, splitted, cleaned up or something else? Utfor (talk) 19:15, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Medicine is also a good place to post IMO--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:52, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your reply. I now have posted it there. Utfor (talk) 13:47, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
 * @Utfor, they're different subjects. "Injection" is a quick squirt into a vein, and "infusion" involves letting a drug slowly drip into a vein.   WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:54, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
 * User:WhatamIdoing Thank you for your answer! I will now correct the interlanguage link at no:Intravenøs terapi. Utfor (talk) 16:18, 20 August 2022 (UTC)

Society for the Right to Die and Concern for Dying articles
Hello all,

I have recently created articles on the US organisations Society for the Right to Die and Concern for Dying, which may of interest to members of this WikiProject.

Any additional eyes on these articles would be greatly appreciated, as I am not an expert in the topic matters at hand - these groups just seemed notable to me. QueenofBithynia (talk) 21:48, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * the second article is as yet unreviewed--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 12:22, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia has been repeatedly hit with advocacy editing (eg, Mad in America). It is in the top 20 most viewed medical articles, and the most highly viewed Featured article, averaging about 6,000 views daily; it is assessed as Top-class important. And yet, it is barely watchlisted or tended, and I can no longer maintain it alone. Unless others are willing/able to watchlist and help keep it updated and accurate, I shall have to give up and send it to WP:FAR. And once medical FAs are defeatured, there really go all to heck; it would be a shame for one of our top articles to deteriorate. Same can be said about major depressive disorder; and I have been doing our best on these two, but more eyes and hands are welcome. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  11:09, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Starting with schizophrenia, and moving on to update MDD soon. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:22, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I did a little editing and tried to add some (WP:SS).
 * There are often sort of "two levels" of summary. So for example, the history article might summarize something else (e.g. History of psychosurgery) which then wants to be mentioned in the Schizophrenia article, so I find myself wanting to then link to the e.g. History of psychosurgery from Schizophrenia even though we are already summarizing...
 * I think if we link through to the appropriate "anti-psychiatry" articles through summary style we might reduce "advocacy"ish editing. I've sort of done this a bit with the history section. The advocacy editing isn't necessarily WP:NPOV or even WP:UNDUE. It's entirely relevant to the schizophrenia article that the vagueness of diagnosis has allowed to be used to torture people for political reasons the problem is more that people go and add something quite specific to the wrong promenent section of an article. Hopefully if it's easy for them to see that the general topic is linked to, and then see that the material they way to add is covered there, there will be less of a desire to add content.
 * I'd just add that I view another sort of "advocacy" existing and indeed evident in the article. Which I would classify as a "pro-psychiatric-powers / benevolent coercion" advocacy. This consists of doing things like: pretending the SGAs have fixed the side effects of FGA so it's less bad to making people take antipsychotics, attributing non-adherence to lack of insight and using ill-defined notions of insight when there are numerous other factors and insight varies over time so that coercion is more benevolent and less coercive, discounting uncertainty in diagnosis so that coercive lifelong use of antipsychotics is more justifiable. I've addressed two of those issues in the article, one remains. This form of advocacy is rather more ingrained and well-funded.
 * We probably want a section on adherence to maintenance therapy in Antipsychotic to link to from this article to avoid too much content... though there are some issues because First-episode psychosis, Bipolar and other diagnoses will have some unique factors to adherence as well as shared ones and the literature won't necessarily be very helpful in telling us which factors are unique to a diagnosis rather than antipsychotics as a whole. Talpedia (talk) 15:35, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I do appreciate what you're saying in regards to "pro-psychiatric" advocacy. Some of this is a problem of attribution, some of it is an issue of tone in the sources themselves. We cannot totally fix the problem of the field, we must only reflect what the field gives us, as in everything in Wikipedia. To do otherwise would be to WP:RGW. I think we can find more modern sourcing which fixes some, but not all, of the issues you have highlighted. — Shibboleth ink  (♔ ♕) 16:32, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I haven't yet looked at your edits, but at least your ideas about using wikilinks to help demonstrate better summary style and manage the issues is a good one, because the article size keeps spiraling. Some of the recent edits don't reflect the sources, and introducing laypress sources in to the medication section, for text that belongs in Society and culture, leads to POV/UNDUE concerns.  I also agree with Shibbolethink that there is some WP:RGW advocacy going on; reflecting mainstream consensus of high quality sources in the medical sections, while exploring Society and culture issues in that section, would help.  Featured articles must WP:WIAFA maintain a consistent citation style, and citations in the style used at schizophrenia, with vancouver author format, are generated by using this PMID filler.  I will go adjust your citations to conform to WP:CITEVAR when I have time to catch up. Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  18:27, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * My take on WP:RGW here is that the consensus that people think exists, or even that people working in related fields think exists, is often not the same as the consensus you find when you have a look at the research literature. This can lead to a form of "truthiness" where people write according to a consensus that does not aware exist. Sometimes the "false consensus" is old, sometimes it's influenced by other things. Being aware of the biases at play can exist help you identify when something is likely to be contradicted by the sources, but should not feed into the actual material you write.
 * Thanks for the heads up about the cites... I tend to use the visual editor with itss citation tool. So if there was a way I could make that do the write thing that'd be great Talpedia (talk) 19:39, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, the visual editor has been the bane of medical content, and when editing a Featured medical article (and even a good deal of other medical content), you just need to be aware when the vauthor format and the Diberri/BogHog template is used to fill citations (it is SO much cleaner, and if we had raised awareness of it, rather than pushing other citation methods beginning years back, it would now be more likely that newer editors would provide PMIDs and DOIS), and just keep the template filling tool handy. I will go through and fix all at Schizophrenia in the next few hours (got sidetracked at the COPYVIO issue above at tomato fever).  I'd add that if I didn't have to (mis)spend so much time cleaning up and maintaining our dwindling number of FAs alone, I'd have more time to focus on the more nuanced issues you raise, rather than becoming completely demoralized at seeing constantly deteriorating medical content defeatured.  We've lost most of our neurology and neuropsych featured content, as once they lose status and others start unwatching, they turn into just more black goo on the internet. Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  19:49, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Achondroplasia / Achondroplasia in children merger proposal
Hi! I'm a COI editor for BioMarin Pharmaceutical, the manufacturer of a treatment for achondroplasia. I've suggested that achondroplasia in children be merged into achondroplasia, per WP:SIZERULE and because of significant content overlap. The merger discussion is here, and I welcome any feedback or input. Thank you! Mary Gaulke (talk) 21:26, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * commented--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:53, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Hemi-Sync
This appears to be a company selling an audio collection of "binaural beats" which, among other things, are claimed to have medical applications (e.g. replacing opioids for pain relief). The current article has no secondary sources for this (and I cold find none). I have attempted to WP:BLAR to Binaural beats but am getting pushback. Anybody know more about this? More eyes could help. Note there is much overlap with the Robert Monroe article. Alexbrn (talk) 14:25, 22 August 2022 (UTC)


 * I was tempted to take this to WP:RFD as the "Hemi-Sync" isn't mentioned at Binaural beats (making the redirect not worth it/that is a common deletion reason), but the fact that it has history makes AfD a better venue more equipped to deal with it. If you do not believe it notable, please take it to AfD. I am not opposed to that. The SandDoctor  Talk 14:53, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * It might be notable quackery, from what this Vice article is reporting about the company's claims. Whatever, the current version with no reliable sourcing for its medical claims is poor. Could redirect to Robert Monroe and then trim the Hemi-Sync stuff there? Alexbrn (talk) 15:06, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think that sounds like a great idea. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:45, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * That is a better target than Binaural beats -- I was only opposed to it being redirected there (Binaural beats) as it had no reference to it and the redirect didn't make sense. The SandDoctor  Talk 16:06, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * That's because "binaural beats" shouldn't be a section of Beat (acoustics). The former is a poorly understood perceptual phenomenon, the latter is well established math/physics (acoustic heterodyning). I would suggest a separate article for binaural beats and merging the hemi-sync stuff in there. - Palpable (talk) 16:13, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * But there's nothing to merge, surely? All the sources are unusable. Alexbrn (talk) 16:16, 22 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I'd defer to the MEDRS experts on that. My reading is that, in the absence of secondary sources, MEDRS seems to allow for primary sources as long as they have appropriate caveats, i.e. no endorsement of the results, but mentioning that the studies were done is ok. I'm not particularly interested in hemi-sync or binaural beats but if I were, I would appreciate having the primary sources linked so I could at least read them. The intent of MEDRS here isn't totally clear to me.
 * My main point is that the binaural beats stuff should be pulled out of the acoustic beats article where it really doesn't belong, presumably to a new article. - Palpable (talk) 16:34, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

The (multiple) Alzheimer drug scandals
On the positive side of things:
 * Aducanumab was handled with no problem at Alzheimer's disease (AD)
 * On the data manipulation allegations related to Aβ*56, the main article AD was (rightly) never affected, and ...
 * Both Sylvain Lesné and Karen Ashe have done fine

On the negative side, there has been raging POV/COI possibly paid editing by IPs at
 * Cassava Sciences and
 * Simufilam, reportedly now being investigated by the Department of Justice

More eyes are needed at those two articles. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  16:51, 6 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Do you feel like Simufilam is stable for the moment, or do you think that we should request WP:SEMI at Requests for page protection? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:03, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The semi at Cassava expires tomorrow ... let's see how it goes, and see if the same IPs go after both, and then decide whether to up protection on both per same. That is, give 'em the WP:ROPE. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  20:30, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Cassava seems to be holding; maybe now that the Department of Justice is on board, there is less motivation to try to slant the articles. But please keep watchlisted. If anyone has an interest, simufilam still needs cleanup. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  14:27, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

The IP returned to Cassava Sciences and the article protection was increased, now for three more weeks; additional eyes at both Cassava Sciences and Simufilam are needed, as POV and probably COI edits continue at both, and cleanup needs remain. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  19:44, 16 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Does anyone have this article? Sandy Georgia (Talk)  04:43, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Is there something specific that you need from that article? There was another published on the same day:
 * Cassava Sciences drops after update on Alzheimer's drug studies. (5 April 2022). The Fly. https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A699432830/ITOF?u=wikipedia&sid=ebsco&xid=9f8382dc
 * that might have the same information (depending, of course, on what you're looking for). (If the URL doesn't work, then try logging in at https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/ first.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:25, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The New Yorker reports that Lindsay Burns is the wife of the CEO of Cassava, as does apparently STAT. That info has apparently been "cleaned" from the article in COI/POV editing, and I am loathe to add it back without more than one source, although my own google searching finds it to be credible.  There are big issues in these articles and most of what is in them is based on Cassava press releases (as is the source you link above), and the articles are a wreck, with millions of $$ at play in research money and the stock market issues.  And there is more on the talk page of this article than I can handle alone (along with the mess on most of WP:MEDs older FAs, that I have also been trying to maintain alone). I am running out of patience at being demoralized at trying to maintain so much medical content myself, and am about to give up and stick big maintenance tags on everything I have been holding the finger in the dike on alone from much too long. Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  14:45, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Are you just looking for a source that says they're married? There seem to be a couple of less-than-stellar sources (e.g., ) and The New Yorker article that you mentioned (available through WP:TWL; it says "Many of Wang's papers were co-authored by Dr. Lindsay Burns, a senior vice-president at Cassava—and Barbier's wife"), but you might like the one written by Burns herself:  https://www.harvardvarsityclub.org/article.html?aid=532  If you need additional sources, then it's possible that there might be a passing mention in one of these long video interviews with Barbier (which I haven't watched):
 * It's not clear to me if this is important to the article about the company, and I doubt that it's relevant to the article about the drug. Married couples who found companies are a dime a dozen.  The Twitterverse seems to think that the husband is blinded to the science because of family loyalty, but CEOs of publicly traded companies often seem to be blind to anything that might suggest their company will fail, even without a family connection, and you could make up a culturally appropriate story about the stereotypical reaction of the husband no matter what he does (e.g., "Of course he's doing nothing; he's just another clueless, bumbling husband" or "Of course he's denouncing the fraud; he's angry at the other researcher for tricking his wife!").  It's usual for biographies to mention that the subject is married to another notable person, but in the article about the company or the drug, it might be challenging to present that information without violating NOR (i.e., by implying that the marriage is relevant to the scandal, as opposed to a minor but colorful historical detail, akin to Silicon Valley's penchant for starting computer companies in someone's garage). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:54, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * First, I was worried that the only source of that info might be STAT, and second, without reading STAT, I couldn't determine how much it mattered. But there are much bigger things to be sorted at that article, and I'm out of time for the next two days ... thx for the help. Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  16:33, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * PS, will add it to her article if/when I find time unless someone else does ... thx again, Sandy Georgia (Talk)  16:34, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Insertion of original research and removal of cited text at Karen Ashe, including this, detailed on talk. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  02:06, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

Woo claims at Johrei
Not sure how to best deal with this one. It's a bunch of SCAM claims back by SCAM journals. Normally I'd just remove things, but since it's an article about woo, there's probably a way to frame things as woo proponents make these woo nonsense claims or something. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:18, 25 August 2022 (UTC)


 * I had a go at the one section. Maybe it will help.
 * But I don't think we can do much about the studies, because it's unreasonable to even mention a study done on lettuce seeds in relation to human health. I re-worded the one that actually used humans.  There is a review article that mentions this study, but it doesn't really say anything about Johrei except that this lone study showed an improvement on two of the five points measured. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:21, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
 * analyzed Johrei and Reiki in the same group. It also discusses deficiencies in the research, but in general terms, rather than specifically about one particular thing.  Publication bias, difficulties with blinding, etc., are called out, but the problems aren't specific to Johrei, so it's probably not appropriate to mention it directly in that article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:31, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

"Tomato fever"
There is an article called Tomato fever about an infection, which is a potential variant of hand, foot, and mouth infection. It's sourced entirely to media sources. Virologist Angela Rasmussen posted a thread on the media coverage. It could probably use some attention, or maybe a banner explaining that it could be unreliable. ScienceFlyer (talk) 23:38, 20 August 2022 (UTC)


 * I cleaned it up to remove a whole lot of WP:NOT advice (that was stated in Wikivoice no less) and take it down to the minimum; unclear whether we have good enough (news) sources to just redirect it to Hand, foot, and mouth disease. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  11:40, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * And, the article has COPYVIO, which next has to be dealt with ... Sandy Georgia (Talk)  18:54, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Done, Sandy Georgia  (Talk)  19:31, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Tomato fever is ready for a new look from other eyes. Best I can do is done, Sandy Georgia (Talk)  21:30, 21 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Although not necessarily RS, this piece by Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is interesting background. Alexbrn (talk) 05:37, 22 August 2022 (UTC)

Could we get more feedback on the merger proposal in light of all of the sources listed at the article? We can't expect to have a secondary review at this stage, but we have no disagreement on any source that it seems to be HFMD. Sandy Georgia (Talk)  17:55, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

Alcohol abuse/use disorder
The discussion at Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents may interest some editors here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:32, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
 * give opinion(gave mine)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 13:35, 6 August 2022 (UTC)


 * No matter what happens at ANI, it appears that we have a couple of problems that we could usefully discuss. Off hand, they include:
 * To what extent should we prefer to use modern language vs. sticking to the cited (and out of date) sources?
 * For example, if the source uses a previous name for Intellectual disability, should we use the current ICD-10 term?
 * Sometimes it'll be obvious (we used to call aspirin a form of chemotherapy, but the concept of chemo has since been narrowed to cancer treatment). Other times, it might not.  It's these latter cases that need to be discussed.
 * To what extent should we prefer to use non-stigmatizing language vs. other options?
 * For example: Psychiatric disorder, psychological disorder, mental illness, mental disease, mental health condition...
 * Also: What if you think _____ is stigmatizing, but I think it isn't?
 * How can we help editors deal with the way that diagnostic criteria and terms change or are disputed over time?
 * For example, previous definitions said that every pregnant woman with high blood pressure and swollen ankles had pre-eclampsia. Current definitions usually require high blood pressure plus protein in the urine.  So – did she really have pre-eclampsia?
 * For example, sometimes the Lumpers and splitters get their way, and an old diagnosis is split into two (Plague is three separate diseases, the way some define "a" disease), or two old diagnoses are combined into one (e.g., DSM-IV separated Alcohol abuse from Alcohol dependence; these were combined into the DSM-V's single entry on Alcohol use disorder; Autism spectrum disorder was more or less created by merging Asperger syndrome with [old definition] Classic autism, PDD-NOS, and a few other things).
 * How can we help editors deal with everyday language vs. technical terminology?
 * For example, male/female; chronic fatigue syndrome vs being tired all the time; alcoholism vs alcohol use disorder)
 * Some changes are easy (you should almost always use kidney instead of renal, because these are exact synonyms and most people only know the more common one). But should we prefer everyday language or common names when that is less precise?
 * What advice can we give to editors about words that have multiple definitions (one of which might be correct)?
 * For example, consider cancer: Many people who say they have Head and neck cancer don't technically have cancer (instead, they have non-cancerous "benign" tumors that could kill them).  Or perhaps I want to shock readers by pointing out the True Fact™ that blood cancer and sarcomas aren't cancers, because they're not carcinomas.  But they are cancers, in the sense that most non-medical people understand what that word means.
 * There might be more questions. @Talpedia and @Colin, I'd particularly be interested in your thoughts about the questions that should be asked. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:21, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Also, in the short term, would it be more useful to everyone if we tried to write up something specific to alcohol-related disorders (the locus of this dispute), to psychology/DSM-type subjects more generally, or more broadly (perhaps even extending outside of core medical topics)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:51, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Some thoughts. These are interesting questions. I tend to prefer to think in a case-by-case way, where you sort of get generalish principles from the specifics of an individual case and after a while you distill this into a policy, so I guess I feel like we should start with the narrowest case of alcohol-related disorders. On the other hand, I have no experience doing policy work here or elsewhere and think that wikipedia might have more of a "top down culture" to doing things - I don't really see people take a precedent based approach that much. Both top down and case by case approaches have benefits, though in real life I get more irked by "we are creating a policy for things we don't understand yet" than "how will we live without more rules".


 * I can certainly see the arguments for sticking to sources when you have disagreements, possibly with a little contextualization when people start disagreeing.
 * As was brought up in ANI, for WP:BLP we need to be careful to avoid misrepresenting people. I think it might be better to say, "James was diagnosed as manic depressive - cite 1 (a disorder now known as bipolar cite 2)" rather than "James was diagnosed with bipolar disorder".
 * I'm not sure I like some of the search and replace that may have been going on in the ANI, and I think the meaning of alcohol abuse is sort of a case-by-case thing. This sort of issues seems like an easy way to pointlessly spread drama across lots of pages where no one really cares. It's different when you have a handful of pages that deal with a topic or closely related topics. I guess for things like "person first" or SUFFER it's more open and shut.
 * I'm inclined to open up "non-stigmatizing" a little and say that some of this language can be more generally "political". You can get turf wars between different fields and different values. I think we want to stay out of these turf wars where possible. There may be cases where things are genuinely non-stigmatizing, but yes I feel that technicality is a better escape and defense from stigmatizing language than being "played" politically.
 * I can see a pretty good argument for consistent language across wikipedia. A rule of thumb might be if you are linking to an article or section of an article that is genuinly about just that thing you should use the name of the article. This sort of moves the conflict into merge discussions.

How can we help editors deal with the way that diagnostic criteria and terms change or are disputed over time?

This feels like a bit of a nightmare for editors. I'd throw in that a similar problem is competing standards like ICD versus DSM. I think google n-gram viewer could at times be helpful since it can confirm if a term has completely fallen out of use. I like the idea of systematic reviews to resolve this sort of stuff, but then the systematic review that DarcyIsVeryCute took the easy root and outsourced to the DSM.

But should we prefer everyday language or common names when that is less precise?

The case that came up was in WP:BLP. I can see an argument for "use common names if the sources you cite are not by expert authors"".

I dislike the use of common language on medical articles, but this is perhaps a personal preference that doesn't easily fit into wikipedia's values or principles. I am quite aware that language can be key to power in professional groups and bureaucratic processes and that people can use jargon to intimidate, confuse, bar access, hide information and suggest complexity where there is none. I don't think wikipedia should be propping up these barriers so I think it should use technical language to give people access to this language and prepare them for other reading. Wikipedia has the power of the wikilink to give the definitions of terms. But obviously WP:JARGON. The counter argument is that you are excluding readers and sort of "extending the reach" of jargon by doing this; the former is plausible the latter less so. Professions will have their own reach and maintain their jargon, and ignoring the jargon doesn't really decrease this.

To what extent should we prefer to use modern language vs. sticking to the cited (and out of date) sources?

In practice, if I were editing around this I would resolve it by trying to find newer sources. I don't know the answer more generally.

There are a bunch of other good questions here that I haven't addressed, but I think that's it for now! I think the principle I use myself outside of wikipedia "when in doubt, choose technical and overly precise language"... I guess because I want the discussion to be precise, and it's almost a request for others to provide details. I also am sort of of positive about "follow the citation graph of your article to the most recent systematic review" as an approach.

Talpedia (talk) 02:34, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

I think too many questions at once, and so hard to focus. One issue is with formal diagnostic terms, the names that committees and organisations agonise over and publish periodically, and that may then change over time. Sometimes a name changes without any change of scope, but sometimes the scope is widened, narrowed or redefined. Sometimes the name doesn't change but those familiar with the literature will know that in the past its scope was different. As noted here, there may be times when we have to use older terminology but perhaps indicate what the new terms is (and this may vary depending on how reliably they are equivalent). Someone in history who had a "fit" or "seizure", for example, cannot be assumed to have had an epileptic seizure. Some medical literature, for example, uses deprecated terms for particular seizure types, and this may be because the doctor is familiar with them and hasn't adopted the new terms yet, or because the doctor is writing outside their speciality and last learned about seizure types in the 1980s at medical school. So there are likely reasons why even modern sources might not use the optimal technical term.

But there are other problems we get where the word is not a technical term invented by a committee. Whether to use the word "woman" or say "committed suicide" or write "wheelchair bound" or "patients" or use "she" for ships... most of recent MOS battles, are not words that we let experts create and define for us. I think for those, what language our sources use is of limited importance.

Then there's medical terminology for anatomy or types of drug or treatments. I agree with Talpedia that part of our mission should be to educate readers about these words, which they may encounter outside of Wikipedia. But at the same time, we have to bring readers with us, and we can't rely on links to lift all reader's vocabulary to the level of a neurologist, and writing like one would to a fellow neurologist, say, gives a strong message to the reader that they are too stupid to understand this subject. It is well established that we need to make an effort for the general reader, but I disagree with the style taken by many medical article leads. The point here is that we will be compelled at times to choose different words than our sources do, and it requires some care to ensure substitutions are appropriate.

In terms of approach, I wonder if merely fixing individual words is always likely to rub some people up the wrong way, and end up badly at AN/I. Most of the text on Wikipedia is overdue a rewrite and an update, so perhaps it is better if editors do that, with new sources, and then they can write in their own words how they see best.

Wrt whether you think something isn't stigmatising (or offensive, or biased, or whatever) I think we need to move away from editors having to convince a majority of RFC participants that this is the case. There will always be language conservatives and always be those who dislike someone saying one should write this way or that way, and such people are rarely honest and direct about this. Rather than saying "I am conservative about this and see no need to change" they invent rules like "stick to sources" when they think the sources might be more likely to align with their preference. They ask us to respect experts if they agree with them and ignore experts if they don't. If some reasonable people find a term problematic, we should at least consider alternatives. Sometimes alternative are remarkably trouble free, yet we still see huge resistance to change. -- Colin°Talk 07:58, 9 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Are any of the questions (these or others) actually easy questions to answer? I'd be happy to get the easy questions out of the way.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:46, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Today, I feel like there are two general themes:
 * Tension between precision/accuracy and understandable/educational content.
 * Specific problems of multiple meanings (e.g., is that "DSM-IV Alcohol Abuse" or is that just plain-English "abuse of alcohol"?)
 * Does that seem like a fair grouping? Does anyone have interest in one/the other/another? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:14, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

In the US any definition of AUD is going to inevitably derive from the DSM in some way, either by including or opposing the DSM's specific criteria. I think of it this way; if I am a prospective researcher wanting to propose a new diagnostic category, how could I not rely on the most widely accepted source on that? This can only happen when either the DSM does not include the disorder, such as prolonged grief disorder up until very recently, or if the DSM's position is highly contentious among academia. The bias towards the DSM and away from the ICD is the main flexibility I think researchers have in changing diagnoses, but the ICD itself often piggybacks from the DSM's conclusions and is more sparse for a variety of sections such as personality disorders. I don't think we have any options other than to use what's served up in the DSM because of this academic deadlock that new definitions need to rely on the DSM to gain academic support.

When sources are out of date, there may not be newer sources, such as for a deceased BLP. There may never be a reliable source translating the mental disorder. I believe in this situation an editor-friendly solution would be to make a template either as a footnote or in brackets that says the following:

Which draws data from a template-protected table where consensus on MEDRS agrees for uncontroversial equivalent names ie. manic depressive vs bipolar disorder. For controversial disorders where it is not unanimously agreed the new and old definitions correspond one-to-one, I believe it is most appropriate instead to require a reliable source reporting on the difference for that specific situation.

What I am proposing might be somewhat technically new, a template which contains a citation and maybe also a footnote, and makes sure the description is consistent and can change on a wide scale with consensus. I'm not sure if that is possible, but it is the most editor-friendly option I can think of for maintenance. I also think this is an "easy answer" in that it defers discussion to working out which equivalently named disorders are uncontroversial, which with the criteria I set out here I think is fairly straightforward. Since it is at this point clear that there is always going to be a loss or change of meaning if we modify information from sources to call alcohol abuse as AUD or vice versa, my proposal separates these case-by-case situations with open-and-shut situations.

Lastly, I don't think WP:SUFFER is open and shut, as Talpedia says, in psychology. The main examples of this I have are "narcissists" and "psychopaths" which are not person-first terms, and also continue to be used academically especially in criminal psychology (a field which lacks person-first language among a general lack of empathy for individuals). The terms "narcissists" and "psychopaths" are also extensively used on Wikipedia. Thanks Darcyisverycute (talk) 02:36, 13 August 2022 (UTC)


 * @Darcyisverycute, would you recommend the "X, now known as Y" even for uncontroversial name changes?  AIUI the only difference between, e.g., "manic depression" and "bipolar disorder" is the name.  Why wouldn't you just use the modern name?  It feels like writing "He was buried in Leningrad (which in 1991 was renamed Saint Petersburg) in 1952", when "He was buried in St Petersburg in 1952" or "He was buried in what is now called St Petersburg in 1952" would be adequate.
 * If it's easier to think about a medical example, do you expect to see articles talking about deaths from "consumption (which was renamed tuberculosis in the 20th century)" or "quinsy (the historical name for Peritonsillar abscess)"? What about offensive historical names?  I don't think we should have articles say things like "His first child had mongolism (the racist name used in the original description of what is now called Down syndrome)"?
 * More generally, I think we might benefit from a discussion about when and whether to stick to the cited source alone (which may be outdated, biased, etc.), or to stick to the overall mass of sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:45, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
 * @WhatamIdoing Thanks for the good examples to test the idea. The question here seems to be, if/when does adding the old name next to the new name add encyclopedic value that readers might want to know about without having to check the sources directly? I am still a little undecided, my initial thoughts are that writing both forms adds encyclopedic value in most or all cases. Prefacing my other ideas though and to answer your last question, I think using the historical term is only appropriate if a majority (or substantial minority) of sources primarily use the historical term - there should always be a preference for using current terminology, but if we are trying to "medically translate" old sources it's important that process is visible to readers.
 * For your example of Leningrad and Saint Petersburg, the renaming is well known, but people learning about the topic without clicking on the wikilink might think Leningrad is a place that still exists, and the information in brackets or a footnote has value to that audience. Maybe it is easier to understand by saying the new name first, like "He was buried in Saint Petersburg in 1952 (which was at the time known as Leningrad)".
 * About the consumption/tuberculosis example, I think this emphasises that the specific phrasing "which is now known as..." or "which in was known as..." is semantically different to "which was renamed..." because the renaming itself for these terms can happen both slowly through cultural acceptance, and through a formal process by authoritative bodies.
 * I think there is also encyclopedic value to someone learning about historical medicine to know that peritonsillar abscess used to be called quinsy. More specifically that the term originated in the late 14th century and that it is still used (albeit infrequently) by medical sources as a synonym for Peritonsillar abscess. I think R from alternative name or disambiguation page is better to use if the term is still used for the specific article, and for articles mentioning the term any alternative name should be fine (possibly using aka so it is easier to track).
 * Thinking about this overnight, I think the template would work better as a footnote so the information is accessible but does not bloat text body readability. For the same reason I think it would make sense if the proposed template is used only for the first occurrence of the word/term. The mongolism example seems to ask the relevance of WP:OM in medical articles. Based on that guideline, I think we can assume a majority of readers won't know mongolism is equivalent to Down syndrome, and it is a vulgar term, so some care is required to not censor the history of the term's specific usage while also not bloating the text. This also emphasies that there no reason to use the vulgar term in-article if it is not widely used among the cited sources. Darcyisverycute (talk) 03:10, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
 * The very last phrase has grabbed my attention. Generally speaking, there can't be a question of whether something is "widely used among the cited sources", because there is usually just one source cited for a given claim.  As a result, we can have a situation in which:
 * The specific source cited at the end of this sentence uses Old Name.
 * Most sources (and all modern medical sources) use New Name.
 * Should we be focused on "the [currently] cited sources"? Or on what's "widely used among [all reliable] sources"?  (The latter is the way we determined WP:COMMONAME and Notability.)
 * And – instead of answering this question right now, I want you to answer this question: Do you think that would be an appropriate and productive question to ask the wider community? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:23, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Apologies for my late reply (real life stuff getting in the way at the moment). I agree the tough question here is what specific idea we can establish consensus on to resolve the majority of these individual choices of language (which on their own are minor or trivial, but at a large scale must maintain consistency of some sort to avoid difficult-to-detect bias). In many ways I think this kind of initiative seeks a stable consensus on-wiki where none exists in real life, which I think is a genuine source of difficulty in choosing a question that won't inevitably lead to a "no consensus".
 * The two policies you mention seem to be very relevant to this discussion and I think they can help with forming a specific question about alternative wordings. Without looking at the policy discussion, WP:COMMONAME's main difference to the discussion here seems to be that we are changing article text and not titles, and I think the restriction around titles is that both technically and logistically it's only possible to have one; so there are slightly different incentives to that decision. About WP:N, I find something curious in there: WP:NNC. If I am interpreting that correctly, for alias terms to be used in an article, there only needs to be verifiable evidence of its usage. I think a comparison can be drawn between list articles and lists of aliases as used in-article; balancing the use of verifiable terms/items in due weight is inherently a subjective process which in list articles often requires inclusion criteria to be decided case-by-case. If you could also point me in the right direction for any P&Gs other than the one relevant paragraph at MOS:B about using alias/similar terms in article text, I haven't been able to find any other mentions of it.
 * About starting a wider discussion (I am assuming you mean an RfC), I think your draft question is good, I also think the question could use improvement in contextualising it with existing P&Gs. Eg. "When a term has multiple equivalent names and some are WP:OM, is it acceptable to use the WP:OM terms if they are not the WP:COMMONAME nor widely used, but used among a substantial (possibly historical) minority of reliable sources?"
 * N.B. I feel like it could be valuable to have some sort of "RfC question drafting" process on-wiki since in many cases it seems the initial RfC wording can bias/derail discussion. Darcyisverycute (talk) 09:51, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I agree about drafting a question in advance. I have been considering the Requests for comment/Example formatting approach, but I currently think we should go with the most popular format and encourage free-form discussion.
 * Do we need to address the question of to what degree a term is considered offensive? There is a range, from widely condemned (e.g., racist names; anything named after a Nazi scientist), discouraged by official and semi-official bodies (e.g., professional organizations and medical textbooks say that spontaneous abortion is callous and offensive), just outdated (e.g., conditions that were renamed in ICD-10 or DSM-IV), to minority objections (e.g., men who think Male breast cancer should be called "chest cancer" because it sounds more manly).  Then there are the non-objectionable differences, such as names that vary per country (e.g., full blood count vs complete blood count) or that just have multiple accepted names. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:14, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think both the "most popular" and "pro and con" approaches could work, I don't have a preference either way.
 * About that second point, I think it would be most useful to specifically draw a line as to what is an objectionable vs non-objectionable difference. There is a continuum of offensive terms, correct me if I'm wrong, we have to draw a line somewhere for the purpose of alias terms (since intentionally alternating terms in-text would also be needlessly confusing.) Darcyisverycute (talk) 05:50, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Alternating terms in an article isn't necessarily confusing at all. Nobody is confused if you alternate home and house.  Nobody is confused if the Alzheimer's article sometimes says Alzheimer's and sometimes says dementia.
 * I assume that the line would be drawn on the basis of reliable sources, rather than editors' personal opinions: "normally avoid" ____ if you have professional medical organizations and other high-quality sources advising against it; perhaps "freely choose something else" if you have a patient group or op-ed advising against it (and no similar sources in favor of it).  Or, to put it another way, you wouldn't really want to have a sentence in the article that says "Many reputable medical organizations and patient groups object to the label _____" and then use label throughout the article.
 * I agree that it's on a continuum. Some situations are so clear that I can't imagine a real dispute (e.g., names that are primarily used as taunts by children), but others require some effort to understand.  For example, UK organizations are united in their opposition to the term spontaneous abortion, but some relevant US orgs don't express a preference either for or against that term.  In that case, I think we'd normally avoid the objected-to terminology.  For a different example, some LGBTQ+ organizations encourage gender-neutral terminology for what's traditionally been called women's health issues.  Medical bodies at the moment usually (a) advise using whatever terms the individual uses, when doing individual communication, (b) encourage researchers to report biological sex and psychosocial gender separately in journal articles, and (c) hope nobody will notice that they said nothing about how to handle mass communication, like what to write on general-audience websites or in newspaper articles.  I think in that case we might vary the terms within some range that seems reasonable for the specific article (e.g., lesbian women, LGBTQ+ people, avoiding needlessly gendered statements ["her fetus" vs "the fetus"]).
 * I'd like to call out another problem with trying to force specific rules about wording: Some editors want to use the same term throughout the article ("variation is potentially confusing").  Other editors want to use whichever term is used in the specific cited source ("WP:STICKTOSOURCE!").  The only way for both of these to happen is to exclude any source that doesn't use the terms we've chosen, and for some subjects, that will mean a violation of NPOV.  In practice, you won't be able to write about pregnant trans people if you need to find a MEDRS-quality source that calls them women. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:05, 26 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Reconsidering what I wrote about "intentionally alternating": You are right, it can be confusing but it is not always. And it's hard for editors to form agreement on what might be confusing or what might be necessary with prescriptive wording rules. Your examples show that it's inappropriate to either always follow or never follow the wording used specifically in the source. Your examples also show that it's impossible to have a universal and perfect balance in using in-article wording consistently versus representing sources accurately.
 * One particular example you mention: avoiding needlessly gendered statements -- I think this is the key of the issue. Deciding what is "needlessly" written seems to me, more or less, as equivalent to the idea of whether some particular wording is "controversial" (the similarity being that the process itself is rife with disagreement).
 * Moving on, should we make a draft page for the questions? Or you're feeling ready to start a directed RfC with the question proposals we've discussed? What do you think? Darcyisverycute (talk) 02:10, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think the fact that we are still generating scenarios to consider demonstrates this is not ready for "the wider community". There are different problems faced by different kinds of topic and the authors we are then citing. For an article on a medical subject, it may be straightforward to just avoid older sources using older terminology, though some terms are stubborn. And we need to distinguish between formally defined terminology and everyday language that the source just happens to be using. But if we are dealing with a biography, say, then the author of that is not a medical expert, may be immersed in antique sources and documents, and feel more comfortable repeating the language of that time.
 * Another example is apoplexy, which our article explains was used pretty much for any sudden spontaneous collapse into unconsciousness and death. A biographical article would likely have to use that term, possibly in quotes, and either explain it or rely on the wikilink. We couldn't substitute "stroke" or "heart attack". But for terms that have an obvious modern translation, I don't see any reason to educate our readers in archaic terminology merely because it was contemporary with the event described. An exception of course might be if we needed to quote someone using that language or they are famous for having died of some archaic disease. But otherwise, I don't think history/bio writers would thank you for insisting on using Leningrad in any text covering that period, nor should we persist with archaic language for diseases in history just for the sake of being contemporary. I mean, we use modern grammar and spelling don't we, and while it might be fascinating to learn older forms of those, that's not really the point of most articles. Wrt censorship, the only place on Wikipedia where mongolism belongs is in Down syndrome. Darcyisverycute, please be very careful with the word "censor" because it does cause some people to disengage their brains and reach for WP:NOTCENSORED (without having read it nor the linked WP:GRATUITOUS). There is a difference between censorship and editorial choice, between being required and compelled to fall in line with some external restriction, and choosing willingly to so because we are grown ups. -- Colin°Talk 09:33, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I think my difficulty is in deciding which of the many questions to ask first, rather than how to ask the selected question.
 * Thinking about Talpedia's preference for starting at the narrow end, we could consider an update to MEDLANG, which says:
 * The term drug abuse is vague and carries negative connotations. In a medical context, it generally refers to recreational use that carries serious risk of physical harm or addiction. However, others use it to refer to any illegal drug use. The best accepted term for non-medical use is "recreational use".
 * "Alcohol abuse" is also vague; "alcohol abuse" also carries negative connotations. In a medical context, the best accepted term is "alcohol use disorder".  But others could use it to describe socially unacceptable behavior (e.g., a single drunken incident), drinking more than the average person, or high-risk drinking (e.g., any alcohol consumed by an under-aged person, during pregnancy, before driving, etc.).
 * Should we discuss a new sentence to be added to this part of MEDMOS? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:01, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Is "negative connotations" the right word? I mean, nobody thinks this is a good thing. Those advocating word change suggest "abuse" is negatively judgemental about the person and their motivates and life choices, leading to feelings that they are to blame and warrant punishment. Even more so is language where the whole person is reduced to a single negative word (an abuser, an alcoholic, a junkie, addict or user). Instead it is neutral to simply state they have an "alcohol use disorder". This seems similar to when we choose to say someone has a medical condition rather than say they suffer from it, and when we say someone has epilepsy rather than labelling them an epileptic. -- Colin°Talk 07:26, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
 * No we shouldn't. We should use that word that the sources use. FMSky (talk) 17:33, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * @FMSky, what do you mean by "the sources"? For example, do you mean all the reliable sources in the world, or only the one that happens to be cited in a particular paragraph? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:46, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * only those in the article obviously, and if you wanted to change the wording you'd also have to switch the sources to support those changes --FMSky (talk) 20:01, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * What if "those in the article" use a variety of terms?  WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:52, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Then use the term that sources use the most often --FMSky (talk) 00:46, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
 * So if the subject's name changes (e.g., Facebook Inc. becomes Meta Inc.), you think editors should first change 50% of the sources in the article, so that the new name is now "the term that sources use the most often", and after that, they are allowed to use the current name?
 * I don't think that's the actual practice on wiki. I'm not sure that it's a good idea, either.  Especially in a shorter article, it would be too easy to cherry-pick sources that "just happen" to use a term that I prefer.  You could find that someone updates the cited sources until most of them "just accidentally happen" to use the Russian-based spelling for a Ukrainian city, "just accidentally happen" to use the same word people holding a certain opinion about abortion, "just accidentally happen" to use the wording terminology preferred by one side of a psychiatric concept and never the terminology preferred by the other side...  and the next thing you know, someone is saying "Oh, we can't use the COMMONNAME anywhere in this article, because a majority of the cited sources in this article use this other name." WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:26, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
 * There has never been any restriction on Wiki that we are compelled to use the wording in our sources. FMSky, think for example if you were editing the French Wikipedia and most of your sources were in English. Our sources are a good indicator of language and terminology but very often they do use language that we don't want to on Wikipedia. For example, they may refer to people with a disease as "patients" or people in a study as a "cohort", because their audience is other doctors and researchers. Whereas we are for a general audience and so people with a disease are "people" (unless we are writing about someone currently in intensive care for example). Medical sources often use jargon for body parts and therapies which we may want to simplify (particularly in the lead).
 * Open up Paracetamol in your browser and do a text search for "acetaminophen". You'll notice our article uses "paracetamol" throughout and pretty much the only place acetaminophen appears is .... in the sources.
 * Or how about Dracunculiasis, which is also known as Guinea-worm disease. The first source is CDC, which is written for a general audience. The CDC describe it as "Guinea worm disease" and rarely say dracunculiasis. Indeed "dracunculiasis" is mentioned by all their sources and they just briefly note it is "(also known as dracunculiasis)". But throughout that CDC article, they abbreviate the disease to "GWD", and use that consistently. Are you suggesting that if we ever cite CDC in the article then we must say "GWD"? Or perhaps it is better if the article is consistent and editors use their own editorial judgement to decide which term is best for our readers. I don't know the history of why that article went with the formal name rather than the common name, but that's what they as editors chose and surely it is best they are consistent throughout the article.
 * Or consider Monkey pox. There is talk of that disease being renamed because it is misleading. They've already renamed the variants, which used to be called "West African clade" and "Congo Basin", and are now just referred to as clade I and II. The virus authorities are realising that naming diseases after regions and countries is stigmatising (syphilis was initially called The French disease by the British). The disease only got that name because it was first spotted in some research monkeys in a Danish lab, but monkeys aren't the natural reservoir. I guess the Danes should be glad we didn't call it the Danish pox. So at some point in the future, our monkey pox article is likely to be renamed, and will consistently use the new name, relegating the old name to a brief mention. And I can be sure that at that point, nearly all our sources will likely still use the old name.
 * This idea that we are compelled to use the language of sources comes up from time to time when we have naming disputes, but it is very much one of those things that obey the old rule: For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, attractive ... and wrong. -- Colin°Talk 08:53, 21 August 2022 (UTC)

Someone to edit Wiki Medical entries
Is there a medical expert or someone familiar with pharmacology and/or toxicology to edit certain pages with high impact?

I'm not an editor or Wikipedia member so I would like some assistance with this.

It would be helpful if you send the Wikipedia Response Team your e-mail and bio so they can forward it to me. 2601:6C5:300:B230:D61:356B:7DFA:C339 (talk) 04:07, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
 * What's the "Wikipedia Response Team"? Alexbrn (talk) 07:04, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
 * It's probably the Volunteer Response Team.
 * Editors may want to review How to not get outed on Wikipedia and some of the pages linked in it before responding. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:59, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

General practitioner and Primary care physician are currently separate articles (????)
Discuss merger at Talk:General_practitioner Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:42, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Commented. Their relationship: . --D6194c-1cc (talk) 15:47, 1 September 2022 (UTC)

Feedback from those familiar with MEDRS appreciated
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Jr8825 •  Talk  17:50, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
 * commented--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 18:10, 1 September 2022 (UTC)