Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Cancer, Health care journalism
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 – which CBS has now profiled three different times – in April 2008, in July 2008, and now on October 18, 2009.
Correspondent Lesley Stahl exhibited some of the same breathless awe that she showed in previous segments, saying at one point, “we don’t want to be in a position to hype this.”
Too late, Lesley, you already have – with three segments in 18 months for something that isn’t even in human trials.
I can only wonder what all the other cancer researchers watching think when they see such cheerleading for such little evidence.
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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