Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism, Health care reform
From Drew Altman, PhD, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. Read the entire column, but here’s an excerpt:
With so much of the media now configured for instant news and the relentless pursuit of controversy, stoked by spin and manufactured news by partisans on both sides, the many great journalists in the news business working hard to inform the public face a big challenge in explaining the complex issues in health reform.
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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