Medical Articles for Private Practice and Clinic Websites
Writing the medical articles for your professional practice or clinic can be a very rewarding undertaking for the health care professional. Your practice or clinic website is an extension of you – your professional image, clinical acumen and even your bedside manner to some extent. If you can impart a bit of yourself in your website, chances are that you will stand out among the thousands of professional health practice websites out there. Not every health care practitioner has the writing skills to create outstanding content but medicine should not be about the glitter – your patients are just simple people and want a simple approach to health care. Where better to start interacting with them in this manner than on your professional practice or clinic website.
Starting a Career as an Online (Internet) Medical Writer
Medical writing comes in many different forms from the more academically inclined journal writing, to consumer orientated promotional material for pharmaceuticals and medical devices to the informative yet simplistic layout of content writing, whether for print or electronic media. Taking this into consideration – a medical journal writer may not be suited for medical content writing or promotional material copy writing. And vice versa of course. Defining one’s niche is essential to becoming a recognized writer in the industry although many versatile writers can switch between formats to produce quality content time and again.
Guide to Writing Medical Articles for the Web
Writing medical content for websites or blogs does differ from other forms of consumer orientated media like in magazines and newspapers. The key for writing medical articles for the web is simplicity while maintaining the technical detail required to accurately relay clinically relevant points to the reader. This is often easier said than done –for the medical professional it is difficult to exclude the jargon, whereas for the professional writer there is confusion about which information has clinical relevance. However, another factor that affects the writing of both the medical professional and the professional writer is search engine optimization (SEO). Medical SEO, and specifically on-page optimization or content SEO will be discussed in future articles. For now, it is important to focus on orientating and optimizing medical content for the Internet user rather than a search engine.
Medical Content Writing for the Internet
What is medical content writing?
Medical content writing is a broad term to describe many forms of clinically orientated writing. It may refer to content writing for academic journals, research papers, medical textbooks, and more consumer orientated forms in print media and on the Internet. True medical writing does not include sales copywriting. Since the Internet is the most widely used medium, medical content writing is almost synonymous with writing for websites. However, there are several other digital entities including blogs, forums, social media and news portals which may be relevant for medical content on the internet.