Science & Society
Trying to Drink from a Fire Hose: Too Much of the Wrong Kind of Health Care News

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tips.2015.08.005Get rights and content

Section snippets

News Stories

Often, news stories fail to explain the limits of surrogate endpoints. A recent Bloomberg story bore the headline ‘Merck drug helps colon cancer patients with DNA repair defect’. However, as we said in our review, ‘Bloomberg…reports on the immune response to the drug and also tumor shrinkage. But how was that response measured? And if a patient responds to a drug, how does this affect a more meaningful health outcome like increased survival? What was needed is some acknowledgment that these are

News Releases

We have begun reviewing news releases only this year, so our sample is small (43 at the time of writing), but growing by the week. The criteria are slightly different for news release reviews, but the kinds of problems in communicating health-related news to the public are very similar (Table 2).

Press releases, written by public relations or communications professionals, and thus the news stories that adapt them for the public, often emphasize subgroup analyses, such as for this study on

Tsunami Prevention

Our reviews are meant to offer constructive criticism. There are many actors with communication culpability at many different stages in the dissemination of research results to the public. We believe that if we don’t improve the public dialog about health-care interventions and the trade-offs inherent with any of them, we stand no chance of effecting truly meaningful health-care reform. With the scenarios I have outlined above, on many days and on many topics, journalists and communicators whip

Acknowledgments

From 2006 to 2013, this work was funded by a grant from the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making. Beginning in 2015, the work is now funded by a grant from The Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

First page preview

First page preview
Click to open first page preview

References (0)

Cited by (7)

  • Conflicts of interest and expertise of independent commenters in news stories about medical research

    2017, CMAJ
    Citation Excerpt :

    Moynihan and colleagues32 reported that 50% of news stories about research on 3 medications cited at least 1 expert or study with a relevant financial conflict of interest, of which only 40% were reported. In a review of health news stories at a health journalism website, 46% did not meet the quality criterion of using an independent source and identifying conflicts of interest, but no analysis of independent commenters was reported.33 Although editorials and news stories represent different mechanisms for commenting on clinical research, each fundamentally seeks to describe the nature and importance of the source research.

  • Immune boosting drugs-a myth or reality-a review

    2020, Indian Journal of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology
  • How to survive the medical misinformation mess

    2017, European Journal of Clinical Investigation
View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text