Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism
Earlier this year, when I published our data on our first two years’ experience on the HealthNewsReview.org project, I thought that surely leading U.S. journalism publications such as Columbia Journalism Review or American Journalism Review would be interested in some kind of summary.
Wrong. Not a word of interest.
But internationally, journalism bloggers from several countries picked up on the story immediately. And now a German journalism magazine, Message: Internationale Zeitschrift für Journalismus, has republished the PLoS Medicine article.
I hope we can get an international discussion started – backed by the experiences of my colleagues on the Media Doctor Australia and Media Doctor Canada projects.
Our combined pool of news stories reviewed in the 3 countries now totals over 2,000 – a very clear picture which shows how many news stories across the globe fail to deliver important details on health news stories such as:
• How much is this going to cost?
• How small is the potential benefit?
• How large are the potential harms?
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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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