What Goes Around, Comes Around

I had a very interesting phone call with a recent college graduate yesterday. Jennifer, who currently works on writing grant proposals at the Rhode Island chapter of the Arthritis Foundation, is interested in pursuing medical writing and publishing as her career. The president of the R.I. chapter put her in touch with me to get some career advice. Like me, she majored in biology but decided she really enjoys writing about the science. She had questions and I loved sharing my thoughts -- we hit it off well, and her eagerness to explore the same career path I took reinvigorated me.

Her questions made me think about a few things I hadn't focused on in some time:
Did I enjoy my career? Definitely, yes -- love it and love being able to provide people with information they can use to improve their lives.

Any regrets? None, except for the ocassional twinge that maybe I should have gone for that M.D. degree years ago, if only to lend more credibility to what I write. If I had become a doctor, I likely would not have the time, thanks to managed care, to give the advice and information I can provide to people now – and doing that is what makes me happy.

Room for growth? It is what you make it.

Is the field growing? Yes and no – health and science writers are fading away from newspapers but showing up in droves on Web sites, blogs, podcasts and other new forms of media. Like with most careers, there will be job security in the future if you're good at what you do.

Must you be passionate about it? Most certainly. But that applies to any career, too. It makes no sense whatsoever to spend your life devoted to a career you don't truly love and feel passionate about. Otherwise, it's not a career, but just a job that feels like drudgery. No happiness there.

Why do I love it? Hmm. I thought back to something interesting I read years ago explaining the overlap and similarities between the scientific process and the process of researching an article and reporting on the findings. After having gone through scientific training herself, I was sure Jennifer would benefit from the analogy. Like a scientist, a medical journalist must make observations through reading, talking with editors, writers and scientists that lead to questions – the (a-ha moment). Then, a hypothesis is formed. A scientist will come up with questions to be answered through an experiment, whereas a medical journalist will come up with questions for interviews. After the experiment or interview, both the scientist and medical journalist will read through all the data collected and come up with a plan for either writing an article or asking more questions. With a bit of luck and lots of hard work, both the scientist and the medical journalist can get to the hoorah moment – a great study that leads to a Nobel prize or a great article that leads to a Pulitzer prize. The challenges in finding new angles within a slowly building base of scientific knowledge is what makes me love it. When I'm really into a subject, I lose track of time and that feels great. I get the same feeling when I play the flute or piano – getting lost in creating an article feels more like creating art than simply writing a story.

And that brings me around to the "What goes around, comes around" theme today. Twenty years ago I wrote a research paper on vitamin A and cancer. Back then, scientists saw great promise in the carotenoids of vitamin A – through foods like broccoli – being able to reduce the risk of several types of cancer. I remember sitting at a glass-topped table in my parents' home pouring over dozens of books and medical journals I took out of the library. This was back in the dark days before the Internet -- no PubMed, no Google searches, no RSS feeds! I was fully immersed in learning all I could about the topic and figuring out the puzzle. I enjoyed every minute of research, even though I didn't even notice the minutes or hours tick by. Once I got a handle on it all, writing the 20-some page paper flowed easily. Yes, writing about science was what I loved doing. I got an A on the paper and soon after got hired as a bona fide employee of a national health publishing company.

A few years into that job, I found myself writing about vitamin A again. This time, it was a corporate report on the benefits of vitamin A for children in Africa. The vitamin easily could prevent blindness and even death – if only the children in Africa weren't nutritionally deficient in vitamin A. Each year I created the annual report on the company's vitamin A intervention program.

Well, I hadn't thought about all that in years. But as I talked with Jennifer yesterday, I noticed a study printout sitting on my desk about vitamin A possibly being able to fight rheumatoid arthritis. Last week, researchers in California at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology found that retinoic acid (derived from vitamin A) could control inflammation by keeping the immune system from attacking tissues. It worked in mice, anyway, and time will tell whether it works similarly in humans and could lead to new treatments for RA and related conditions such as psoriasis or colitis.

In either case, vitamin A research is in the news again. I've been following it for years and haven't tired of it in the least. It's fascinating to see what scientists know and how it evolves over time. Yes, it can be maddening to hear that one day something is helpful and another day to hear that it's harmful. But picking up on those apparent flip-flops means you're observing science (and journalism) as works in progress -- you're part of it all.

Hopefully Jennifer is excited to start tracking subjects that interest her now; over time a few will pop up as her favorites, and she'll find herself losing hours to delving deep into some topics. Speaking of vitamin A and spending hours of research time again ... be sure to look at what I found regarding vitamins in the upcoming Sept-Oct issue of Arthritis Today. In that issue will be our 2007 Vitamin Guide with background information on the vitamins and minerals your body needs, as well as whether research showing any benefit for arthritis and related conditions exists. If you can't wait until then, you'll find nutrition information on our new and improved Web site: www.arthritis.org/ArthritisToday.

Keep reading... I'll (happily) keep writing!