Last week I discussed meldonium, which was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in January 2016 for use by sportsmen and women, because it supposedly increases blood flow and therefore exercise capacity. Meldonium is the International Nonproprietary Name (INN) of 3-(2,2,2-trimethyldiazaniumyl)propanoate, an analogue of the immediate precursor of carnitine, trimethylaminobutyrate (Figure 1). Meldonium is […]
Meldonium is in the news again. It was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in January 2016 for use by sportsmen and women, because it supposedly increases blood flow and therefore exercise capacity. A few months later, the tennis player Maria Sharapova was found to have taken it, reportedly to “combat a magnesium deficiency, […]
Catachresis, the mistaken use of one term for another, can arise through confusibility, which I discussed last week, or through ambiguity. Ambiguity (Latin amb-, implying both ways, + agere to drive) is the capacity of a single term to be understood in two or more ways. It can be lexical (i.e. affecting a word), grammatical, […]
Catachresis (Greek κατάχρησις, from χρῆσθαι to use, κατά giving a sense of perversion) is the mistaken use of one term for another. When not due to sheer ignorance, it can arise through confusibility or ambiguity. Confusibility occurs when two or more terms can easily be mistaken for each other. Ambiguity is the capacity of a […]
Last week I discussed the concept of teleoanalysis, in which different types of evidence from disparate sources are analysed either simultaneously or sequentially. To be clear, the term implies not the very last analysis that could be done, but a thorough systematic analysis of all the evidence available at the time, from, for example, randomised […]
A meta-analysis is an analysis of analyses. Specifically, it is an analysis of the combined results of several studies, typically randomised clinical trials. However, other forms of evidence can be adduced in seeking information about effects in medicine. It is possible to perform meta-analyses on data from observational studies and even case series or case […]
Most therapeutic medicines have at least three different names. The chemical name, whose form generally follows the rules issued by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). For example, (R)1(3,4dihydroxyphenyl)2methylaminoethanol; the chemical name is an unambiguous description of a drug’s structure, but it is usually cumbersome and irrelevant to practical prescribing, although there […]
As I noted last week, animals are monophyodonts, diphyodonts, or polyphyodonts. Rodents and some cetaceans, for example, are monophyodonts—their teeth grow continuously and are never replaced. Humans, and most other mammals, are diphyodonts—they normally have two sets of teeth (dentitions), although the numbers of teeth in each dentition are different, so that the 20 deciduous […]
As I noted last week, “spuria”, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “spurious works, words, etc.”, was first recorded in 1918. The word appeared in Rupert Brooke: a Memoir by Sir Edward Marsh, who also edited Brooke’s Collected Poems in the same year (pictures). Commenting in a footnote on Brooke’s use of “your” […]
My list of medical anniversaries in 2018 is restricted to those that are multiples of 50 years. Thus, I have not included, for example, the 40th anniversary of the first test tube baby, Louise Brown; nor the 40th anniversary of the poisoning, supposedly with ricin, of Georgi Markov; nor the 60th anniversary of Ian Donald’s […]