Posted by Gary Schwitzer in Health care journalism
A couple of gems you shouldn’t miss just because they were published over the holiday weekend.
Natasha Singer of the New York Times had an important piece, “When Patients Meet Online, Are There Side Effects?,” about privacy concerns when social networking sites like CureTogether.com and PatientsLikeMe.com, offer online communities for patients and collect members’ health data for research purposes.
John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel published another in his “Side Effects” series on conflicts of interest in health care. This one was about doctors vouching for the drug Multaq for treating atrial fibrillation without ever having seen all of the data.
The Star Tribune began a “Too Much Medicine” series. Health editor Dave Hage informs that they’ve been working on this project for nearly a year with plans for a few more installments in coming months, each covering different ailments and procedures that are over-used or under-proven. (Unfortunately I think the series is only available in the print editions.)
Addendum on June 3: The Strib has now posted the first two pieces online.
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/95188129.html
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/95233234.html
Overall, this was an easy-to-follow summary. But there was a clear difference between this and a competing Boston Globe story, which did a better job offering context and analysis.
This Boston Globe blog post gave its audience a more thorough understanding of an emerging approach to virtual colonoscopy than the Wall Street Journal.
Longer, but overall not any better, than the coverage from the competing LA Times story. Not thorough enough to explain what this preliminary research actually means for readers–which is not much at this point.
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