It’s a TV sweeps ratings period, and it’s also breast cancer awareness month, so any boob could see this coming. The Washington Post makes a big deal of the fact that DC station WJLA is making an even bigger deal about: “…breaking TV’s unspoken taboo by showing two women fully exposed on its late-afternoon and [...]
In the circles I run in, there’s been a buzz about an announcement first made last December about a “partnership” between the FDA and WebMD. Yesterday the two entities announced an expansion of that partnership “to provide increased access to FDA’s consumer health information.” I can appreciate the FDA’s interest in reaching the public more [...]
Excerpt from Dr. Len Lichtenfeld’s blog posting, criticizing both the JAMA article and the NYT article this week that raised questions about screening. “This was an opinion piece, not original research. It reiterated arguments that have been made before, and are certainly valid. But they represent the thoughts of several respected scientists, but not all [...]
Gina Kolata had her article in the Times – subject of my blog earlier today (below). Later, the American Cancer Society issued this news release (Is it a retraction? Is it a correction? Is it ‘we wish we hadn’t said that to the NYT?’ Is it “Gina Kolata got it wrong?’ What is it?).
CBS News last night proclaimed the drug peramavir as a “lifesaving drug” for serious cases of H1N1 infection. Lines from the story: • “Experts caution its too early to see Peramivir as a miracle drug, but there’s no doubting the drugs connection to some miraculous results.” • “Human clinical trials in the U.S. and Japan [...]
CBS 60 Minutes once again devoted a big chunk of prime time last night to an unproven idea – which is fine, if you’re going to devote your show to such explorations of basic science all the time. But they don’t. And it shows. The subject was the pie-plates-and-radiowaves cancer experiment of inventor John Kanzius [...]
A writer posted a query on the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) listserv last week asking for ideas about state-of-the-art but underused treatments. Many of the responses were troubling. Some AHCJ members wrote in suggesting: • MRI is far superior to mammograms for detecting breast cancer (leading another member to write in asking where [...]
Maggie Koerth-Baker’s interview with me about HealthNewsReview.org- and how she connects it with her grandfather raising semi-feral chickens. !!!
HealthNewsReview.org review summary: A 183-word story just can’t do much. And this story didn’t. The NY paper clearly picked up the story from the BBC and passed along erroneous information about basic information such as where the study was published. But at the heart of the story was the improper and inaccurate use of causal [...]
Dr. David Gorski writes: The quantity of misinformation in that single six minute video is far beyond the scope of this article. .. I leave the dissection of this pièce de résistance of disingenuousness and misinformation as an exercise for readers (of his blog).
We look for more critical analysis of FDA expedited approval of a new drug like this.
Five-star story on small study that tries to counter large body of evidence on soy supplements for hot flashes.
Our reviewers, including a leading women’s health clinician-researcher, felt this piece would have been benefited from more data and context.
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