My friend and fellow Minnesotan Maryn McKenna has written a powerful book on the drug-resistant staph infection called MRSA or methicillin-resistant Staphyloccocus aureus. The book was just published last week and is already drawing lots of due praise. It’s also an interesting story of a path taken by a former daily newspaper health journalist. McKenna [...]
Duff Wilson’s New York Times piece, “Risks Seen in Cholesterol Drug Use in Healthy People,” raises important questions about expanding the market for statins. Especially strong was his breakdown of absolute risk reduction – and of cost impact. Here’s how he ended the piece: “Critics said the claim of cutting heart disease risk in half [...]
Just a month and a half ago, a health care journalist wrote on Twitter, “Just once it would be nice to get through Valentine’s Day without some new goofball health story about chocolate.” She didn’t get her way. On February 11, we reviewed a HealthDay story, “Dark Chocolate May Lower Stroke Risk.” Well, substitute Easter [...]
A paper in the current American Journal of Infection Control looks at how quickly – and erroneously – health information can spread via Twitter. ABC reports that one of the authors “said that even a single inaccurate tweet is broadcast on average to tens of thousands of people.” Please allow us to issue that same [...]
Every week on HealthNewsReview.org, we criticize stories for failing to emphasize that a given piece of research was in animals – and for failing to discuss the limitations of such research. Here’s more evidence about why that’s important. The journal PLoS Biology has published an analysis, “Publication Bias in Reports of Animal Stroke Studies Leads [...]
We just don’t see many stories that profile someone who declines aggressive treatment for prostate cancer and chooses watchful waiting – or active surveillance – instead. But that’s what Judith Graham of the Chicago Tribune delivered yesterday, explaining that: “…for the first time it’s being endorsed for large numbers of men by a major medical [...]
Before we close out colon cancer awareness month, I want to draw attention to another important paper in the journal Gastroenterology, “Understanding differences in the guidelines for colorectal cancer screening,” by Thomas Imperiale and David Ransohoff. (subscription required, published online March 16 ahead of print). The authors start with the broad message that guideline-setting in [...]
The Journal of the American Medical Association this week published a commentary, “Psychiatrists’ Relationships With Pharmaceutical Companies: Part of the Problem or Part of the Solution?” by the chief of the National Institute of Mental Health. On his blog, psychiatrist Daniel Carlat praises the “power (and courage) of the country’s chief psychiatrist calling his own [...]
There’s been surprisingly little coverage of an analysis by the Nordic Cochrane group in this week’s BMJ that concludes: “We were unable to find an effect of the Danish screening programme on breast cancer mortality. The reductions in breast cancer mortality we observed in screening regions were similar or less than those in non-screened areas [...]
A study in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association, “Stopping Randomized Trials Early for Benefit and Estimation of Treatment Effects,” gives another troubling look at how inflated may be some of the claims about research findings. One of the authors, Victor Montori, MD, of the Mayo Clinic, is quoted on a Mayo blog: [...]
At least on the Chicago Tribune’s website, this story appeared in the Health section – not the local business or feature section. It didn’t address most of the things we think are crucial in a health story.
“Brown fat” has ignited a grease fire of media hype in recent weeks.This WebMD story missed a good opportunity to smother the flames.
We reviewed this story and a competing AP story on these new fibroid studies. Read and compare.
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