Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Screening
That’s a line from a commentary entitled, “The Benefits and Harms of Mammography Screening: Understanding the Trade-offs,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week by Dartmouth’s Steve Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz.
Blogger Merrill Goozner did a good job summarizing the piece. So far he’s the only journalist I’ve seen who’s written about the article as I go to post this.
As the authors wrote:
“…people need balanced information. Simplistic slogans touting only the benefit are deceptive. Simple, standardized summaries (and they provide a table of some) about the benefits and harms of testing would help foster good decision making.”
That’s something journalists struggle with every day in telling health care stories – as we’ve shown over and over on HealthNewsReview.org.
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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