Capitalisation, names and degrees
Which words take a capital in English, which name a drug or a device goes by in a document, and which letters follow a person's name are each settled by convention.
Capitals in English
Capitalisation conventions vary from one language to another, and in English a proper noun takes a capital. A title needs a capital only on its first letter and on any proper noun inside it, not on every word, but the European Society of Cardiology takes a capital on each word, because each word is a noun in itself.
The first word of a sentence always takes a capital, and where a sentence opens with a chemical compound whose name starts with a number, the number stays as it is and the first letter of the word takes the capital. In one usage writer's view, no rule requires the noun after digits that open a sentence to take a capital, so 121 patients were enrolled needs no capital on patients. A writer who will not start a sentence with digits never meets the question, since the number is then written out, as One hundred and twenty-one.
The name of a bacterium, a genus or a species takes a capital at the front and the rest in lower case, and in an abbreviated name the species still takes a lower-case letter.
Web and website
The tenth edition of the AMA Manual of Style, published in 2007, capitalises Web where it refers to the World Wide Web, an entity, refers to citations "on the Web", and keeps Web separate from site. A 2009 usage column endorsed these forms and called the lower-case website and "on the web" incorrect, although they could be seen a dozen times a day, and it counted them among its lost causes.
Drug names
Many drugs carry different names in different countries, and even in the same language, so the World Health Organization keeps a list of international nonproprietary names whose purpose is to identify a single name for each selected drug and so allow a common understanding. The list is one of the organisation's terminological duties, and it gives the recommended names in its six official languages, Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, plus Latin. Paracetamol, for example, is the nonproprietary name of the drug known as acetaminophen in the United States and elsewhere. In 2013, national health ministries' use of the names eased communication between countries, and the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization always used them in their official documents. Documents about drugs almost invariably use the generic name, as biomedical journals and regulatory authorities require.
Device names
Devices have generic or non-proprietary names too, held in the Global Medical Device Nomenclature database, but publications about devices, unlike documents about drugs, commonly use trade names. The AMA Manual of Style prefers non-proprietary names for equipment and devices but asks for the trade name, the manufacturer and its location as well, to enhance clarity, especially where several brands of the same product are compared.
Written entirely in trade names, a paragraph describing a hypothetical percutaneous coronary intervention could be taken for something out of a sports car magazine: a BMW Elite is advanced, a Taxus Express deployed, a Navifocus WR fails, and the procedure is achieved with a Xience Xpedition followed by a Sprinter. Written with the generic names and the further information the AMA manual recommends, the same paragraph advances a Balance Middleweight (BMW) Elite coronary guide wire, deploys a Taxus Express paclitaxel-eluting stent, finds the Navifocus WR intravascular ultrasound not working, and achieves the procedure with a Xience Xpedition everolimus-eluting stent followed by post-dilation with a Sprinter balloon dilatation catheter, each followed by its manufacturer and location.
Proprietary names are evaluated much more stringently for drugs than for devices, although in theory the rules governing their approval are similar: a trade name should not be confusingly similar to another product's name, imply unique effectiveness, or exaggerate effectiveness or superiority claims. The difference comes from the high rate of medication errors associated with drugs. Most drugs come in standard formulations for oral use or injection, and similar physical appearance is not uncommon. Strict control of proprietary names aims to keep look-alike preparations from having sound-alike brand names, to minimise medication mix-ups. That kind of error is rarely encountered with devices, where a practitioner is highly unlikely to confuse an insulin pump with a pacemaker.
Devices used to be named after their inventors: the Grüntzig balloon catheter after Andreas Grüntzig, who performed the first balloon angioplasty, and the Palmaz Genesis stent after Julio Palmaz, who invented the balloon-expandable stent. That practice has become passé. Because of the relatively relaxed nomenclature rules, device names now tend to be racier, more exciting and less abstract than drug names. Real rather than coined words are often used, and metaphorical and analogous names abound: Fox, Coyote and Mustang are balloon catheters, and Freestyle, WaveSense, Jazz and BGStar are glucose monitoring devices. Many device names are superlatives that imply strength and power: Supera is a peripheral stent, Quantum Apex a balloon catheter, Conquest Pro a guide wire and Tornado an embolisation coil. The surgical robots Zeus and Da Vinci follow the Greco-Latin route to implying superpower and genius. Such names raise the question whether the Miracle guide wire family, the knee replacement devices Journey and Triathlon, or the TRUEresult glucose meter can deliver what their names promise.
As manufacturers scramble for a blockbusting brand name, finding something unique and catchy becomes increasingly difficult. Some names are puns: the InsuLinx glucose meter, the Guidezilla guide extension catheter, and the Chocolate percutaneous transluminal angioplasty balloon catheter, whose balloon segments that contact the vessel wall and minimise local forces are called pillows, separated by grooves.
A person's title and degrees
As a rule of thumb, Doctor is used for both a doctor of medicine and a doctor of philosophy, and in direct address, as at the opening of an email, it takes a capital. In the United States the medical degree is MD, written after the name. In the Commonwealth countries of Australia, New Zealand, England and perhaps South Africa, the medical degree is MBBS, Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, written after the name of a person addressed as Dr, and a further degree such as a master of science follows it; whether Canada follows the same convention is uncertain. PhD after a name tells the reader that the person is a doctor of philosophy and not a doctor of medicine. A bachelor of science can be written B.Sc. or BSc, and both are acceptable, as for BA.
Lists of degree conventions are readily available online, so a doubtful case can be checked against them.