Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism
If you’re going to cover an issue like spinal cord injury rehab, you’re jerking the audience around when you use terms like “breakthrough.” But the tenets of sound health journalism don’t seem to apply at ABC’s Good Morning America, where breakthroughs abound.
See the HealthNewsReview.org review of an ABC GMA story. Excerpt:
Without providing any evidence from the literature and relying solely on anecdotal information, this segment falsely raises hope, only adding further frustration and insult to injury.
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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