Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Cancer, Health care journalism
Canadian drug policy researcher Alan Cassels observes October as breast cancer awareness month by analyzing the hype of breast cancer drug Herceptin. He writes: “The media pushed the glee meter into the red zone, with words like ‘breakthrough,’ ‘wonder drug,’ and ‘impressive advance,’ overblown, laudatory adjectives that I admonish journalism students to strenuously avoid.”
Cassels concludes his column: “We all want new and better breast cancer treatments, but that doesn’t mean we should allow selective and misleading reports of a drug’s benefits to drain our public health care system of precious dollars, and put suffering patients on a roller coaster of hope and despair.”
Treatment for advanced ovarian tumors may lengthen survival, but questions still remain, despite the story’s emphasis on “promising” and “new hope.”
As with the HealthDay story on this research that we reviewed, readers of this story get a good dose of caveats and cautions along with the suggestions that electrical brain stimulation might someday “have implications” for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
The readers of this story and the other one we reviewed by Reuters are likely to understand that electrical brain stimulation could have some memory effects, but it’s a long way from becoming a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.
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rebecca farmer posted on October 5, 2005 at 1:41 pm
Hi, I think you’ve posted on the Think Before You Pink campaign in the past, and I wanted to let you know that the newest phase of the campaign has launched and is available online at http://www.thinkbeforeyoupink.org. This year’s campaign is focused on all the pink ribbon products on the market and asking the companies that sell them to be forthcoming about how much money they actually give to breast cancer, etc.