Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism
Registered dietitian Rebecca Scritchfield blogs about “The Price of Misinformation in the Media.”
She writes:
Bottom line: ANYONE can call themselves a nutritionist. You can. Your grandma can. President Obama can.When a person calls themselves a nutritionist with no formal or accredited training and spreads misinformation on television, everybody loses.
She also gives a nice plug to our HealthNewsReview.org project.
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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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LeeAnn Smith posted on August 17, 2009 at 9:53 pm
I’m glad to know that registered dietitians are setting the record straight about the difference between registered dietitians (RD) and nutritionists. As a dietitian myself I cringed watching her segment on GMA. Hopefully, this will help lessen the spreading of misinformaiton.