I'd be most grateful to all who could spare time to respond to the queries
below.

Background
I am battling with a vendor of continuous voice recognition software (no
names,
no pack drill -- there are four main possibilities) over their healthcare
vocabulary add-on, which to my mind is full of egregious errors.
Recognition of
continuous speech requires as much contextual information as the programmers
can obtain -- it is this that enables the program to sort out correctly
sentences like 'It is too much to ask that he attend two hospitals' and get
all
the various to/too/two's right. They wanted 'medispeak' as she is commonly
spoke, so they somehow collected millions of words in thousands of
communications between doctors and hospitals (some years ago, I suspect) and,
regardless of how these defy convention, their software chooses the majority
spellings whenever there are alternatives, and presents these as the
definitive
vocabulary. 

Now, there is a longstanding and useful convention in anglophone medical
literature that allows instant distinction between generic drug names and
their
trade equivalents by spelling the former all in lower case but giving the
latter an initial capital. It would seem, however, that this is honoured as
much in the breach as in the observance in more casual/ephemeral medical
writing today (vide recent emails), and the programmers in this nameless
organisation say that if most doctors in their 'mediwrite' sample used capital
letters for generic drugs here and there, even if apparently randomly, and
were
inconsistent in various other respects, then that is what the vocabulary must
do. 

If this results in two out of five generic cephalosporins in the vocabulary
being capitalised and four others not, in digoxin having a small d and
Digitoxin a big one, penicillin a small p but Erythromycin a big E, gauze a
small g but Muslin a big M, in antidiuretic being one word, anti-diabetic
hyphenated, and anti diarrhoeal two words, in acetylsalicylic acid
appearing as
acetyl Salicylic acid, and AIDS appearing as aids, then so be it: the punters
can always make their own corrections, if they care a jot about such things --
the words 'which we suspect they do not' hanging unspoken in the air. (This is
true, but the task would be somewhat Herculean, and I have been able
relatively
easily to correct in my own review version all but one of the above anomalies
after from two or three to a dozen attempts per example. Anti diarrhoeal,
however has so far resisted 50 attempts: I have been able to persuade the
program to list one word as a possible alternative but not, so far, to choose
it off its own bat.)  

I am trying to convince them that this is not really a satisfactory approach
and that their vocabulary should at least try to get things right and
discreetly help doctors towards correct spellings and usages, just as one
depends on a spell-checker to correct one's mistakes and/or ignorances, and
not
to reproduce them and dumb down to the lowest common denominator. Because of
the method of compilation, however, this is evidently a major task they seem
reluctant to undertake.   

Would, therefore, as many chaps and chapesses as possible be so kind and
helpful as to reply to the following questions, preferably directly, so as not
to bore the bandwidth, to <[log in to unmask]>. 

Depending, of course, on what ye say, I may have more lead in the pencil with
which I seek to castigate them -- at present I am apparently a lone voice in
the wilderness, accorded the weighting the program auto-assigns to one
spelling, even if correct, as opposed to ninety-and-nine that are not --  'No
one else has complained', they tell me!

T I A

Hugh de Glanville
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1. Were you aware of the convention of using an initial capital for a drug's
trade name and no capital for its generic name? 

Yes/No

2. Would you bother/try to follow this rule in a referral letter to
hospital/letter to a colleague?

Yes/No

3. Would you notice/care if a consultant's letter got it wrong

(a) consistently   Yes/No

(b) inconsistently (e.g  '. . . prescribe either cefotaxime or Ceftriaxone . .
.') Yes/No 

4. Would you correct your secretary for such errors?

Yes/No

5. If you were into voice recognition [and it is getting prety good], would
you
buy a vocabulary add-on with these anomalies? 

Yes/no

6. Is life too short to worry about such petty things? 



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