Medical Affairs and balanced communication

Medical Affairs is the function through which scientific information is produced, appraised and shared with healthcare professionals. Keeping it distinct from commercial activity is not a matter of form: when a result travels without its source, its limits and its uncertainty, data quietly turns into a claim.

Finding, interpretation and open question

Clarity in scientific communication is not achieved by writing short sentences. A reader needs to be able to separate three distinct layers:

• Finding — the result measured in a specific study, in a specific population.
• Interpretation — an assessment of what that result means.
• Open question — what the available data cannot answer and what further research is required.

When these three are written in the same paragraph with the same degree of certainty, a reader cannot tell which statement rests on data and which on inference. Balanced communication does not mean concealing favourable results; it means making the conditions under which a result was obtained as visible as the result itself.

Carrying the context

An efficacy result becomes misleading once it is detached from the context that produced it. The elements worth preserving include:

• The study design and what the comparator actually was
• Inclusion and exclusion criteria, which define whom the result belongs to
• Whether the primary endpoint was pre-specified or defined afterwards
• The effect size together with its confidence interval
• Duration of follow-up and the proportion of participants who did not complete

When only a relative risk reduction is reported, an effect can look substantial even where the absolute difference is small. Reporting relative and absolute measures together is therefore a condition of accuracy rather than a stylistic preference.

Authorship and traceable contribution

In publications prepared with corporate support, who contributed what should be stated plainly. The ICMJE criteria tie authorship to four conditions and direct that contributions failing those conditions be acknowledged rather than credited as authorship. Where medical writing support was provided, declaring it does not diminish a publication; it makes it traceable.

Good Publication Practice (GPP 2022) sets out how planning, authorship, data access and disclosure should be handled in industry-supported publications. What these guidelines share is that they do not treat corporate support itself as the problem — they treat concealing it as the problem.

Declaring relationships

Declaring financial and non-financial relationships gives a reader the context needed to weigh the information. A declared relationship does not invalidate content; an undeclared one, once discovered, undermines the credibility of everything around it.

A practical check before publication

The following questions should be answerable before a text is released:

• Does every numerical statement have a traceable source?
• Has a result been generalised beyond the population that produced it?
• Are measures of uncertainty reported alongside the result?
• Are the known limitations of the study present in the text?
• Are contribution and disclosure statements complete?

These questions do not weaken scientific content. They let readers decide for themselves how much weight a text can carry, which is what scientific communication is for.