In this paper we explore the utility of Machine Translation as a writing aid and its impact on the quality of the text produced. We focus on medical practitioners who are native speakers of Spanish and who need to publish their scientific work in English as a foreign language. After carrying out a general survey to determine whether Spanish-speaking medical practitioners already use MT as a writing aid, we engaged five participants in an experiment where we asked them to write a paper in Spanish that was subsequently machine translated. They were then asked to post-edit the MT output. We analyse their post-edits and further attempt to evaluate the overall quality of their texts by engaging a professional proofreader. Our results suggest that the texts produced with the help of MT+post-editing still require many edits in order to be considered of acceptable quality. In the conclusion, we identify several avenues worthy of future investigation and that could help achieve better quality.