Last Sunday I spoke at the National Breast Cancer Coalition Foundation annual conference. There were about 800 people in the audience, so it’s understandable if I didn’t meet (or don’t remember meeting) breast cancer advocate Sandra Spivey who was in the crowd. She got back home from the meeting and did what I told all [...]
Nice piece on how “Foods masquerading as drugs have become a $160 billion business” and how even products that flop in clinical trials continue to be marketed as if their evidence was golden. Excerpts: Foods masquerading as drugs are the hot spot in the packaged-food business. The world’s biggest food companies are stuffing ostensibly beneficial [...]
There has been so much hype of proton beam therapy – especially for prostate cancer – much of it dismissing any discussion of lack of evidence and soaring costs. Given that backdrop, it was refreshing to see a Sanjay Gupta piece on CBS last night that exercised some restraint in reporting on proton beam therapy [...]
CBS4-WFOR, Channel 4, in Miami, is the latest CBS station to report on chiropractors “using a new adjustment to the neck to help bring down blood pressure.” “If the bone is out of alignment and putting pressure on a nerve, it interferes with the ability of the heart to function properly,” a chiropractor explains on [...]
Glyn Elwyn of Cardiff University, along with a team of colleagues, has a paper in the current Journal of Medical Internet Research about their attempt to examine men’s use of an online decision aid for prostate cancer screening. They conclude: “There is evidence that Prosdex (the decision aid) promotes informed decision making in men, and [...]
“The reporting and interpretation of findings was frequently inconsistent with the results.” That’s the conclusion of a study published in this week’s JAMA. Spin that however you want, it adds to the growing evidence, as the paper notes of: • a positive relation between financial ties and favorable conclusions stated in trial reports. • discrepancies [...]
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, with excitement in his voice, announced a “brand new technology approved just 3 weeks ago by the FDA.” It was a story about a tiny camera inside the coronary arteries – a technology called Optical Coherence Tomography. ABC called it: • a new “cutting edge device.” • a “new technology that could [...]
The big ALLHAT study of drug treatments for high blood pressure showed, as Harvard’s Jerry Avorn writes, “that for patients with hypertension but no major comorbidities, thiazide-type diuretics were as good as or better than other agents that at the time were considerably more costly, many hoped this “old-fashioned” approach would gain new respect and [...]
Heart rhythm specialist physician-blogger John Mandrola begins his blog posting today with that line, referring to recent news about a study of ablation for atrial fibrillation (AF) also reducing the risk of dementia. In it, he links to our site because of our frequent cautions about overenthusiasm for preliminary findings presented in abstracts at medical/scientific [...]
Here we go again. The big annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting is still weeks away. But last week ASCO held a news briefing in which it selected six out of more than 4,000 abstracts posted online in advance of the meeting. 6 out of 40,000. Predictably, journalists started reporting on [...]
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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