WebMD posted one of those stories that makes my skin crawl. The formula: use a cute, sexy headline and lead sentence, then follow with weak caveats, leaving the reader with nothing useful at the end.

The story is headlined, "Levitra a Day May Keep the Doctor Away." It promotes Levitra use with its lead sentences, "Men now have two new reasons to take erection-enhancing drugs every day. Those reasons: The drugs may lower a man's risk of heart disease and of noncancerous prostate symptoms." But then it follows with, "This provocative speculation is based on short-term data from a small study." And it ends with, "But it's not yet time to start popping those little pills along with your daily vitamins. The study findings... are preliminary."

How do you justify the headline and the lead with the caveats? And this story was reviewed by a physician? Perhaps the editorial and physician review team need to be reminded of the number of preliminary findings presented at scientific meetings (as this was) that never pan out. And when that happens, journalists like these aren't around to correct the record.

Chalk it up as a waste of time and space. Come back when you have large-scale, long-term findings to report.

Jessie Gruman, Ph.D., of the Center for the Advancement of Health, offers a column on the dangers of television health news and information. Excerpt:

“In Oklahoma City, a popular new local television program based on the ABC network’s “Extreme Makeover” takes women eager for a new look and sets them up with plastic surgeons, Lasik practitioners and cosmetic dentists.

In Baltimore, a local news program airs community service features about new developments in pediatric care and women’s health.

In Washington, D.C., a station gravely reports on the prognosis for Peter Jennings (who airs on a competing channel) and then suggests free CT lung scans at a local hospital for long-time smokers.

What is wrong here?

In the first instance, the makeover artists are licensed health care practitioners and a university medical center paying for the “right” to inflict medically unnecessary and risky cosmetic surgery. In the second instance, two large hospitals — one a university medical center — are buying time on the newscast with the hope of luring high-paying or well insured patients to boost the bottom line in a competitive market. In the third case, viewers are not told that the free lung scans are part of an international clinical trial that by its very nature entails some measure of risk.

It would seem there is another health risk at work here — the local broadcast news media.”

Three of my former Dartmouth colleagues published an excellent review in the Washington Post on how news coverage last year "probably misled readers about both the size and certainty of the benefit of aspirin in preventing breast cancer."

More than just pointing a finger, the researchers explain how the research was misinterpreted and offer some lessons about interpreting medical research.

Since they cite stories that appeared in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today and the major television networks, it is a lesson worth learning.

Old school journalistic values are still important: it’s vital to try to preserve objectivity and distance from your subject and sources. You may not always achieve it, but you don’t throw these values away willy-nilly.

Then comes TV news ratings/sweeps periods.

KSTP-TV in Minneapolis began a two-part series on one of their reporter’s ovarian cancer last night, two days into a new ratings period. I’m quoted in the Star Tribune criticizing the decision. Station executives use predictable defenses to justify their decision.

What’s not in the paper are some of my other concerns:

1. Who says her case is representative of other cancer patients or even of other ovarian cancer patients? Then why is it newsworthy?
2. Why is it newsworthy? What editorial decision-making took place to lift her story to air worthiness? What’s the last story they did on ovarian cancer? Does it take someone on the on-air staff being diagnosed with something to get a station to report on it? What were the factors that made this newsworthy?
3. In weighing newsworthiness before a sweeps period, did they give any thought to covering the 20-30,000 Minnesotans who might lost MinnesotaCare coverage under current legislative proposals? Are the 30,000 less important than the one in-house story?
4. The station says that there is important public education to be achieved by publicizing such a case. If that’s so, what was the last story they did on ovarian cancer prior to this?

This is not an isolated case. It’s just the latest of many, in which TV people think their celebrity status is at such a level that their stories rise to newsworthiness, whereas the plight of the great unwashed remain unknown.

CNN, in a new struggle with the definition and practice of credibility, played matador in allowing questionable statistics on the air in a debate over a Texas legislative move to prevent same-sex couples from becoming foster parents. CNN allowed a supporter of the legislation to claim that research showed that children in foster homes with same-sex parents are 11 times as likely to be sexually abused as those with heterosexual parents.

“The Numbers Guy” column in the Wall Street Journal nailed the shady stat: “To get on CNN, that number snaked through a twisting path, from a little-noticed Illinois study published by an antigay scientist/activist in a psychological journal, to several conservative Web sites, to, finally, the attention of a Texas activist who presented her misinterpretation of the study on national television, essentially unchallenged. It's a textbook example of how flawed numbers can gain national attention if advocates work hard enough -- especially when there aren't widely-known conflicting estimates.”

The CNN anchor, supposedly moderating the debate, allowed the claim to go unchallenged. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show showed up CNN by capturing the moment on the air, and archiving it on his website (see Gaywatch video section).

When one reader saw my posting about CNN's declaration that a pediatric surgeon was a "god" doing "miracles," he referred me to a similar story in the Onion, entitled "Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In the History of Mankind Ever."

Read it. It may remind you of something you've seen in TV health news.