Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine

Edit with VisualEditor

Welcome to the WikiProject Medicine talk page. If you have comments or believe something can be improved, feel free to post. Also feel free to introduce yourself if you plan on becoming an active editor!

We do not provide medical advice; please see a health professional.

• Unsure about something? Make sure to look at our style and source guidelines.
• Please don't shout, remain civil, be respectful to all, and assume good faith.
• Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
• Please sign and date your posts by typing four tildes (~~~~).
• Threads older than 10 days are automatically archived.
• Please see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Medicine/Newsletter/Mailing_list

List of archives

Merged Archive WikiProject Preclinical medicine: 1 Merged Archive WikiProject Clinical medicine: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 WikiProject Medicine Archives: Index, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172

Watchlisting request for Black fungus (COVID-19 condition) and Mucormycosis

Mucormycosis

Could some helpful community stalkers of WP:MED kindly add Black fungus (COVID-19 condition) and Mucormycosis to their watchlists? Following extensive news coverage, these two pages are attracting more or (occasionally) less gf edits, which may sometimes potentially detract from their value as (relatively) reliable sources of encyclopedic-type information for general users, including perhaps journalists etc. Thank you, 86.186.155.163 (talk) 20:47, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

will keep eye on, thanks--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 16:17, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Created first article

Was it a good idea to redirect Hydrothorax to Hepatic hydrothorax? The whole article ha no sources and was essentially a disorganized collection of information. aeschylus (talk) 23:30, 24 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure about that. I think you have redirected the general case to a more specific one (like redirecting "disease" to "liver disease", even though most diseases aren't specifically liver diseases). WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:21, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Hepatic hydrothorax is a subset of pleural effusion. So, you could link it to the pleural effusion page where it lists liver cirrhosis as one of the causes. Pleural effusion, when unspecified, is called hydrothorax. So, I doubt we need a separate article for hydrothorax. I agree with your point that the hepatic hydrothorax article could be spruced up with references. Here's one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6647819/ Iciplascarfern (talk) 00:49, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

@Iciplascarfern, is a separate article for hepatic hydrothorax a good idea? I believe that there are a load of sources in journals describing it as a condition. aeschylus (talk) 01:37, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

@Iciplascarfern, so what you are saying is that hepatic hydrothorax doesn't need an article? aeschylus (talk) 02:17, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, yes, but here I don't see and reliable sources for other causes of hydrothorax. They all point towards the hepatic hydrothorax. aeschylus (talk) 01:38, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

@aeschylus I meant that 'hydrothorax' does not need an article because 'pleural effusion' covers it already. 'Hepatic hydrothorax' is a type of pleural effusion, so you could have a page for 'hepatic hydrothorax' (provided it is well-sourced). You could add a link to hepatic hydrothorax as a related topic on the pleural effusion page, if you wanted to. However, you redirection from hydrothorax to hepatic hydrothorax does not make sense because they are not one and the same. Iciplascarfern (talk) 12:40, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm by no means a clinician, I've not read the pleural effusion article, and I've no alternative targets to suggest; but I just want to mention that ICD-10 and ICD-11 both classify hydrothorax (J94.8 and CB2Y) away from pleural effusion (J90 and CB27). Little pob (talk) 13:40, 25 May 2021 (UTC)

Ferric pyrophosphate citrate?

Should Ferric pyrophosphate citrate have a separate article from Iron(III) pyrophosphate?

My additions to the Iron(III) pyrophosphate article were reverted by a user with a COI claiming they are different. See https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Iron(III)_pyrophosphate&diff=1025109615&oldid=1005539217

--Whywhenwhohow (talk) 03:47, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

@Whywhenwhohow, they are different chemicals ([1] vs [2]), but I'm not sure whether that means they should have separate articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:26, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Is it Triferic? - maybe just redirect it to Rockwell Medical#Products as a place holder for now. CV9933 (talk) 13:30, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Maternal mortality

I don't know if anyone would like to beat me to it, but I believe articles such as Death of Shalon Irving[3] and Death of Lauren Bloomstein[4] are deserving of coverage. As I mentioned here previously, I recently started a similar article, Death of Chaniece Wallace. If anyone knows of other high-profile maternal mortality cases feel free to chime in. I just know that US media has focused on this issue because of poor US outcomes. Thanks. Biosthmors (talk) 22:22, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm not sure those should be individual articles. I'm not downplaying the tragedy of the deaths, but we're not a news site or a memorial site, and it doesn't appear to me that those women were notable outside of the news generated as a result of their deaths. It seems to me that an article about maternal mortality in African-American women might be a better way to cover this topic in a more comprehensive fashion. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:41, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

Created Shalon Irving with a redirect to Black maternal mortality in the United States#Racism and Lauren Bloomstein as a redirect to HELLP syndrome#Notable cases as an interim or more permanent measure depending on consensus. Given WP:1E that seems a reasonable way of ensure that content related to those women can be found by readers. Klbrain (talk) 15:14, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm reasonably confident, from a not-in-depth search, that Death of Lauren Bloomstein is a viable article, and have put it on my mental list. I can find several years of sustained coverage, and the NPR/ProPublica article, to quote another source, "contained an unusual amount of detail". Vaticidalprophet 16:48, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Afraid I don't really agree with attempts to create articles about individual patients whose condition has been emphasised only to illustrate broader points about variation in care. This does a disservice to those whose care was suboptimal but did not come to the attention of journalists. We will achieve much more by including information about variations in care in the broader sense.

I have said something similar on the RFD for the Lauren Bloomstein article.[5] JFW | T@lk 15:08, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

"Other stuff doesn't exist" is a poor argument how you're using it. We have tons of 'Death of' articles who happen to be the person whose death for a certain reason caught media attention, and if anything those are far more comparable than "lots of women who've died in childbirth didn't get media coverage". Vaticidalprophet 15:29, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

It seems a rather American phenomenon and I can't think of many examples in the UK (where there has also been a concern about maternal mortality, as per MMBRACE). Are we ironically looking at introducing systemic bias? JFW | T@lk 15:57, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

No, and that's a frankly absurd argument. If it's systemic bias to write one (1) article about an American subject, we may as well shut down the project, because people aren't going to stop doing that. There are many, many articles for "people who died of a not-rare-but-not-common cause and who, unlike most people who died of such a cause, received media attention for it"; Murder of Bella Bond (GA), Leelah Alcorn (FA), Death of Ms Dhu (FA), Murder of Irene Garza (GA), to name a few. Do you plan to take those all to AfD, because they do a disservice to murder/suicide/etc victims who don't have articles? Vaticidalprophet 16:35, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

In my opinion each article created as part of this effort will need to establish notability. I will stop now, because I think others should weigh in rather than us getting into entrenched discussions. JFW | T@lk 21:55, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

I've read about several of these deaths, and I appreciate the editors who are working on Black maternal mortality in the United States.

I have wondered how many of these individual deaths will still be reported on in five or ten years. The overall subject, I hope, will continue to get attention for as long as the disparity exists, but I wonder whether the individual examples of the problem will be the same, or if the media will move on to other examples.

I therefore wonder whether this information might be more durably placed in a well-sourced list, with substantial descriptions and redirects, rather than individual, and therefore individually disputable, articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:59, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

COVID-related RFC

Coronavirus

Wikipedia talk:Biomedical information#RFC: Disease / pandemic origins. appears to be about what kind of sources are needed to describe the origin of the pandemic. All interested editors are welcome to share their views. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:00, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

Talk:COVID-19 pandemic Please also take a look at the RfC in relation to the transmission of the virus, and which method is more important per the sources. --Almaty^✉✎ 17:35, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

COVID-19 and misinformation: how an infodemic fuelled the prominence of vitamin D

An interesting read[6] and further evidence (as if it's needed) why the strict sourcing requirements of MEDRS help. Alexbrn (talk) 15:50, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

Monoclonal Immunoglobulin Deposition Disease

Would anyone be so kind as to give Draft:Monoclonal Immunoglobulin Deposition Disorder a review before I submit it. I want to make sure it's compliant. Red Fiona (talk) 18:58, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

did a few edits you may want to add pathophysiology/mechanism/pathogenesis section--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 21:39, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Thank you very much. Red Fiona (talk) 22:59, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Discussion about article "Osteogenesis imperfecta"

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk: Osteogenesis imperfecta#Subtypes, which is about an article that is within the scope of this WikiProject. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 17:09, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

@Ozzie10aaaa: You've given me this same thank you note a few times and it's not needed and probably not preferable unless you have something to add, so other editors don't need to read irrelevant comments. Please don't thank me for posting. Psiĥedelisto (talk • contribs) ^{please always ping!} 14:38, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

@Psiĥedelisto: no problem Ive deleted it(yes it does seem you havent received any comments yet, it takes time[7])--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 14:43, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Article request for criticism of psychiatry and psychology practices.

Anti-psychiatry is a movement rather than just criticism of psychiatry which has a connotation that entire stream of psychiatry is bad. But there are various kinds of practices in psychiatry and psychology which are criticised, obsoleted and changes with time, just like any other branches of science. Sometimes there is a delay in this change or updatation though. I want to request an article on criticism of psychiatric and psychology practice, and how it changes with time.

Controversies about psychiatry article discusses the subject of psychiaty as a matter of controversy, it does not have a discussion on individual practices and methods and their criticism.

Therefore I request an article on criticism of psychiatric and psychological "practices" rather than entire psychiatry and/or psychology. RIT RAJARSHI (talk) 04:41, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

My view is that Controversies about psychiatry is sufficient, and open for expansion if more is needed on practices. However, my view is that criticism of such practices are already present in those articles, with a link to main articles (so, appropriately in WP:SUMMARY format). For example, Controversies about psychiatry#ADHD or Controversies about psychiatry#Psychosurgery both discuss practices. Other articles would just create undue overlap. Klbrain (talk) 09:06, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Most viewed stub in this Wikiproject

Rapid antigen test 92,779 3,092 Stub--Coin945 (talk) 15:00, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Interesting. Looks underassessed -- I've bumped it up to start. There's a long tail of medical stubs, but many of them would be...difficult...to expand. (I wrote XYYYY syndrome to about the stub-start border, and I don't think there's any real way it could ever be longer.) Vaticidalprophet 15:07, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Grading Malignancy Article

Hi there, I have been editing the stub malignancy article and managed to get it up to a C class. I then added a few more sections and an infobox and I was wondering if this is enough to get it up to a B class?

Thanks! Becomingeditor (talk) 23:29, 31 May 2021‎ (UTC)

Welcome, Becomingeditor, and thank you for your work. I have re-rated the article as B-class. I wonder whether you would find it easier to use the word-processing-style editing environment. You can see it by clicking this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malignancy?veaction=edit and the settings (if you like it and want to use it long-term) are in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing (scroll down a bit). WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:55, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Grading Circumcision and HIV Article

This is grading as low importance. HIV is currently the most devastating pandemic of recent history, and circumcision is a proven preventive intervention. The fact that is applies most to Subsaharan Africa does not make it unimportant and suggests to me a cultural/colonial bias. It is unimportant to whom? Petersmillard (talk) 16:06, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Per WP:MEDIMP it should probably be rated "High" as it affects many people. Alexbrn (talk) 16:23, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

The fact that is applies most to Subsaharan Africa does not make it unimportant and suggests to me a cultural/colonial bias It suggests to me that the script people use to rate articles defaults to low, and most people don't bother to change it. Vaticidalprophet 16:25, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

How many people use the importance ratings? Would anyone miss them if they were gone? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:05, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

I would. I think article assessment is a vital part of the project, and the fact most people ignore it is a problem with them, not with assessment. We are the archivists of our age; properly categorizing articles by how good we thought they were and how important they were to us is how the historical record knows our preferences and priorities. (Perhaps, in turn, it is telling of our priorities if we find this issue unimportant.) Vaticidalprophet 17:29, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

I don't think there is any indication that most people care about the importance ratings even in that context, and I disagree that one editor deeming a topic "low importance" is particularly ... important to the wider world. All what they do is to upset people, such as in this case. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 17:47, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

IMO it ought to be called a "priority" rating rather than an "importance" rating, but changing the template requires updating tens of thousands of pages, and it's never seemed worth it.

The point of these ratings is to show the level for this group, not for the world in general. We generally rate "subtopics" as low importance to this group. That is, we think our time is better spent on HIV and male circumcision as separate topics than on HIV and circumcision as a combined topic. We have accordingly rated in the category described as "Article may only be included to cover a specific part of a more important article" (i.e., Low). That puts it in the same category as Nobel Prize winners, Spanish flu, Suicide methods, Asbestos, Herd immunity, COVID-19 lockdowns, and every article about COVID in any country. These are all important articles overall. They just aren't the ones that this group normally focuses on. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:52, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

You know, They just aren't the ones that this group normally focuses on. seems like an argument that they are in fact useless. In fact, my impression was that this project tends to focus on articles with a large amount of readers (i.e articles where inaccuracies have the most impact) or these that someone has brought up here. Deprecating importance ratings for a project is possible; Wikipedia:WikiProject Visual arts did it too. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:56, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

"Importance" ratings aren't useless, but they have very limited uses that are not apparent to most people. These ratings were created by and exist primarily for the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team. The idea is that if a subject interests Wikipedians enough to form and sustain a group of editors on wiki about it, then the articles that are most interesting to this group should be given extra "points" when articles are selected for offline releases. Since the main criteria are popularity and quality, this additional criteria helps combat some types of bias by increasing the odds that the collections will include articles of importance to small groups of people (e.g., an article about a city that most English speakers have never heard of, but which is important to people from that country, or an article that is important to people of a small religion/ethnic group/sexual orientation/etc.).

Since we're tagging articles for this purpose anyway, some WPMED folks additionally use the ratings to focus their own editing or patrolling efforts. If you're interested in trying this out, then this link will let you see all the non-bot recent edits made to top- and high-importance articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:21, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Narcissistic abuse

The article Narcissistic abuse has been nominated for deletion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Narcissistic abuse (2nd nomination). All input helpful Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:12, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

What’s your opinion on this source?

I found this one article on The BMJ called Rethinking sex-assigned-at-birth questions. I haven’t read the whole thing yet since I don’t have access to it, I was thinking about adding it to medical relating to articles on sex and gender to give some due weight to a certain view.

Any thoughts on this?CycoMa (talk) 01:47, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

CycoMa, that's an editorial, similar to an OpEd in a newspaper. The only thing it could be considered reliable for is for the attributed opinion of those authors - but given that it's a fellow and two students, it's virtually certain that their opinion isn't due weight to include in Wikipedia. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 02:13, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Berchanhimez okay thank you, I was thinking about going to resource exchange to get access to. But, I was afraid of using this as a source because I’m aware there is some misinformation regarding this topic. I just didn’t want to contribute to spending misinformation.

I guess not using it as a source is the best idea.CycoMa (talk) 02:17, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

No problem - while sex and gender aren't necessarily always medical topics, this looks like it's at least borderline and potentially well into MEDRS territory as it seems to be discussing the potential mental health harm that could come from asking such a question to someone who does not identify with their sex assigned at birth. IMO better to be cautious and just say probably not a good idea to use it. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 02:23, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

@CycoMa, you can request access at https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org/ through the Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:34, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Repeating links

I was thinking about one of the problems of reading Wikipedia articles on mobile devices. The mobile web site (not the app) looks like this. If it thinks you're on a desktop device, all the sections are auto-expanded, just like they are on the desktop site. But if it thinks you're on a mobile device, then all the sections are auto-collapsed, and they function sort of like the table of contents. You look down the list and pick the section you're interested in – maybe it's ==Signs and symptoms==, maybe it's ==Cause==, hopefully it's ==Society and culture== (as that's the section I had the most fun researching ten years ago) – but you pick your section, tap on it, and it expands so you can read it. You don't see any of the content that you haven't expanded.

Naturally, since you're skipping to the section you want to read, you're not reading the article straight through, from top to bottom (and almost nobody actually does that, even on the desktop site), this means that you have missed a whole lot of background information, and you've missed a lot of opportunities to hover over links and figure out what the various words mean. I've been wondering whether we should be adding links more generously, maybe even once per section for key words.

I finally looked up WP:REPEATLINK, which says surprised me by encouraging that some links be included more than once, specifically "in infoboxes, tables, image captions, footnotes, hatnotes, and at the first occurrence after the lead." So if you are inclined to be more generous in adding links, then please consider these options. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:46, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I've been talking a ton about this lately, including at a medical GAN and medical pre-FAC PR. I always link at least once per section, and have occasionally done so more if it's a weird word in a long section, or if non-editor readers have re/inserted the link (i.e. there's clear reader demand for it). If I'm writing with jargon, and in this area I always am, then the majority of readers need repeated links to even understand an article at all. (And that's pretending all desktop readers are reading through, which they aren't either.) It's not what the current MOS says; it is, I am sure, what the MOS will say in two years. Vaticidalprophet 02:57, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I think the MoS is a bit contradictory here. It begins "Generally, a link should appear only once in an article" but the "first occurrence after the lead" exception would, in any substantial sized article following guidelines, likely repeat nearly all the links of the lead. Something that is therefore routine should not be written as though it is the exception to the rule. Of course we know of many articles where the lead bears no resemblance to a "summary of the body", but that's the goal. The text "if helpful for readers" seems redundant, since that should always be our goal, including ignoring MoS if necessary. I suppose if we want this relaxed or reworded to consider how readers generally use our articles, rather than assuming they are robots or FAC reviewers reading from top to bottom, then we'd need to discuss this at the MoS page. I also think the "once" restriction is too much, especially for very unusual terms. Even if the reader has read sequentially, they may not have felt the need to know (more) when reading the earlier usage. -- Colin°^Talk 07:43, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

I agree that it would be good to reconsider these rules at some point. Readers don't benefit from too many links (although reasonable people might disagree on exactly how many constitutes "too many"), and it's also bad to have too few. But for right now, the word-of-mouth approach differs so significantly from the written rules that I think that merely following the written rules would be a significant improvement in longer articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:30, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Vietnamese tuberculosis

how best to deal with this stub, any opinions would be very welcomed, thank you--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 13:41, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

• Option 1: I could not find the term "Vietnamese tuberculosis" readily elsewhere. So, I propose we rename the stub as "vietnamese timebomb" disease and explain how melioidosis could present with symptoms of tuberculosis and be misdiagnosed as tuberculosis. There are a few reviews like this and this on the topic. We will need to dig further to see if the topic deserves its own page.
• Option 2: the second option would be to make this a part of the melioidosis page with any more recent references like the 2020 paper above.Iciplascarfern (talk) 19:24, 4 June 2021 (UTC)