HOW DO DEVELOPING COUNTRIES SUCCEED IN MEDICAL JOURNALISM?
Medicine is an ever-growing science and art. New treatments cure old diseases, and new diseases constantly emerge. Thanks to the improved health standards; many infectious diseases have been almost completely eradicated in some industrialized countries and are being replaced by cardio and cerebro-vascular diseases. This tendency is evident if one compares today’s medical texts to those belonging to a few decades ago. The advancement in technology and the use of high-tech devices also accelerates this transition and increases the already-existing scientific gradient between industrialized and developing countries.
In developing countries, however, infectious diseases such as diarrhea are still among the major killers, particularly in children. In these countries, people seldom survive up to the old age and therefore there is less emphasis on geriatric medicine. As a consequence, physicians practising in the third world countries are faced with situations far different from those encountered by practitioners in industrialized countries. This duality, indeed, makes a strong argument for third world countries to present their own somewhat different and new medical findings, and this in turn necessitates publication of their own medical journals.
Every day hundreds of medical journals are published and distributed worldwide. To seek an appropriate position, we must contribute to the current literature; we should have something new to say. Nevertheless, with our restricted equipment and limited research budgets, competing in those fields of research that are very well funded and are already under intensive research by scientists working in industrialized countries, will be fighting on an uphill battle, and duplicity of such research is both futile and a waste of limited resources. Research on locally prevalent diseases, however, seems to be a more reasonable approach. For example, while in industrialized countries almost no case of echinococcosis, leishmaniasis, or thalassemia is seen, in some third world countries, these diseases are endemic.
As long as the necessary equipment and techniques, as well as well-funded research facilities, are not available to scientists investigating in third world countries, the only realistic way to play a role in the progress of medicine and have an internationally acceptable medical periodical, is to emphasize on geographic medicine. We must extend the frontiers of those research areas, which are mostly untouched by scientists working in industrialized countries. The only thing we have to do is simply to observe and analyze our findings carefully.
In order to gain international acceptance, articles to be published are usually required to be written in a language other than the native language, which is a problem for most authors. Nowadays, most research papers are written in English, a language de facto recognized as the international scientific language. Nonetheless, English has not always enjoyed its present status. In ancient times, Greek, Latin, and Arabic have played such a role. This change in scientific language from Greek, Latin and Arabic into English, is in fact a reflection of a shift in research centers from ancient eastern countries to western countries. This obstacle facing journalism in third world countries is now removed by the existence of some translation centers, which help authors to prepare their work easier and to present them in a more acceptable manner.
Third world countries, with hundreds of thousands of physicians monitoring the majority of the world’s population, are an important potential source of scientific observations and research. To ignore this huge research data resource, is to waste an enormous potential to advance medical practice in these countries and throughout the world at large.
F. Habibzadeh MD
NIOC Outpatients Polyclinics,
Shiraz, Iran