This AP story raises many important questions about the quality of information consumers receive (or not) about the quality of care. Excerpt: “Millions of seniors signed up for popular Medicare Advantage insurance plans don’t get the best quality, an independent study found.…The analysis found that 47 percent of Medicare beneficiaries are in plans that rate [...]
Liz Szabo fits several important reminders into her story about the FDA’s approval of Provenge for prostate cancer. For example: • Benefits: the vaccine helped men with advanced prostate cancer live four months longer than men given placebo shots. • Harms: one in four Provenge patients had a serious side effect, with 3.5% suffering a [...]
Physician, journalist, entrepeneur Bruce Dan was recently diagnosed with acute myelocytic leukemia and is blogging about his treatment. As another friend of Bruce’s – Robert Davis – wrote to me: “It’s really remarkable that Bruce is able to write about his leukemia treatment as he goes through it, sharing his perspectives as a patient, physician [...]
MSNBC.com posts a lot of videos on its website. I wish they’d exercise a little more editorial rigor about this video bazaar. This story on a minimally-invasive back procedure is vague about what it’s used for, cites no evidence, doesn’t mention cost, and lets conflicted physicians get away with their promotion of the approach. “Quick [...]
HEAT is the acronym for the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services’ Health Care Fraud Enforcement Action Team. And they turned up the heat on drugmaker Astra-Zeneca with a fine “to resolve allegations that AstraZeneca illegally marketed the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel for uses not approved as safe and effective by the Food and [...]
On his Cardobrief blog, Larry Husten captures the latest chapter in the promotion of coronary calcium screening. There’s a new study in JAMA that says the technique can improve the classification of heart risk. Husten writes: “Once again a study has turned up results that appear to favor widespread application of calcium screening. And once [...]
Good story in a collaboration between Kaiser Health News and the Washington Post.
An example of cheerleading journalism for local medical centers appeared in the Rapid City (SD) Journal recently. The story was headlined, “Cholesterol machine pulls out LDL.“ If only the paper had pulled out a few vital facts. But it didn’t. The story describes a local medical center’s “new machine” called the Liposorber, to “strain out [...]
This is Jon Palfreman’s latest film. Preview and information available at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/vaccines/. Excerpt: “On one side sits scientific medicine and the public health establishment; on the other a populist coalition of parents, celebrities (like Jenny McCarthy), politicians and activists. It’s a war that increasingly takes place on the Internet with both sides using the latest [...]
Gil Welch and Bill Black of Dartmouth address cancer overdiagnosis in a new review article in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Excerpt from the abstract: “We estimated the magnitude of overdiagnosis from randomized trials: about 25% of mammographically detected breast cancers, 50% of chest x-ray and/or sputum-detected lung cancers, and 60% of prostate-specific [...]
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.
We will not display your name or e-mail address on the site, nor will we share youre-mail address with any third parties.
For site updates and news from Gary, find us on Twitter:
HealthNewsReview: @HealthNewsRevu
Gary Schwitzer: @garyschwitzer
Copyright © 2012 Health News Review
