Humour and satire that readers recognise
Humour, satire and invented material reach print in professional medical journals, where a later reader who meets them out of their setting can take them as serious evidence. A piece built on invented names and references can label them as fictitious on the page.
Satire mistaken for evidence
Tongue-in-cheek research studies sometimes find their way into print in quite respectable journals. Two British physicians quantified swearing by surgeons over 100 consecutive elective operations and found, over an 8-hour operating day, 16.5 swearing points for orthopaedic surgeons and 10.6, 10 and 3.1 for general surgeons, gynaecologists and urologists, against little more than one likely "bugger" in 8 hours of ear, nose and throat surgery. A surreptitious, prospective cohort study of how often physicians nod off during scientific meetings, published and indexed with its abstract on PubMed, found that wearing tweed seemed to increase the risk of nodding off and that there was less nodding off when speakers were raving or dropped the microphone. Each year the BMJ publishes humorous articles in its Christmas issue, such as "The Darwin Awards: Sex Differences in Idiotic Behaviour" and "Case Report of E.T.—The Extraterrestrial".
Once satire is ensconced in the literature, "drive-by" researchers may mistakenly take it seriously. A farcical study of the energy adolescents expend playing video games has been cited some 400 times. An article comparing how men and women respond on sighting a unicyclist, "Sex, Aggression, and Humor: Response to Unicycling", has become evidence, recorded in the book The Male Brain, supporting a theory that humour evolved from male aggression.
A chapter report in the AMWA Journal gave the attendance at the second meeting of a chapter's book club as nearly double that of the first, seven and then thirteen, with a tongue-in-cheek p value of 0.00001.
Labels for invented material
In a fictional diary entry in the AMWA Journal dated October 2030, a sixty-year-old narrator visits his physician in a converted drive-through restaurant, deposits home samples at the first window and collects express treatments at the second, all in two to three minutes, and has his genome scanned in under a minute, where twenty years earlier correlating a single nucleotide polymorphism with a disease took several years. Its invented specifics include personalised medicine, which colleagues once called the unattainable pinnacle of therapeutic intervention, delivered at a converted fast-food restaurant; a practice staffed by two nurses, a receptionist and two technicians; and declines in cancer and central nervous system disorders credited partly to an eco-nutrition movement, whose invented seminal study, with an invented journal reference, found eaters of homegrown whole food 50% less likely than eaters of processed food to develop cancer, diabetes and neurodegeneration.
A footnote to the piece states that the product names, logos, brands, trademarks, symbols and references featured or referred to in the article are fictitious, for illustrative purposes only, and not claimed by the author, so one sentence covers both the invented brands and the invented citation.