Here's a book you should buy and read. University of California Press has published "The Healthy Skeptic: Çutting Through The Hype About Your Health," by Robert Davis, PhD.

Disclosure: Robert is my friend and trusted colleague. I hired him at CNN longer ago than either of us wants to remember.

Just to give you a taste of his book, here are some of the chapter titles:

1. Says Who? How We Know What (We Think) We Know
2. The News Media: Eat This!
3. Diet Books: Don't Eat That!
4. Advertisements: Take a Supplement!
5. Government Campaigns: Watch Your Cholesterol!
6. Celebrities: Get Tested!
7. Health Groups: Wear Sunscreen!
8. Consumer Activists: Beware of Chemicals!
9. Anti-Aging Doctors: Don't Get Sick, Don't Get Old, Don't Die!
10. Guaranteed! Overpromising on Prevention

We need more journalists like him, and more informational/educational efforts like his book.

Congratulations, Robert. Hope you sell a bunch of them.

Visit HealthNewsReview.org to see its entirely new design and new "Join the Discussion" forum, allowing for better dialogue among journalists, health care consumers, news consumers and others.

The site is now two years old and has reviewed more than 540 stories.

I should have mentioned Sandy Szwarc's blog, Junkfood Science, long ago. I am impressed by the depth and thoroughness of her analysis.

This week she jumped all over news coverage of a study linking alcohol intake to breast cancer.

You should read the entire post, but it begins:

Does a single drink a day really raise a woman’s risk for breast cancers? That’s what 403 media stories (and counting) have been reporting, based on a new study said to be “the largest of its kind.� But not all studies reported in the news are worth taking seriously or let worry us. Here’s why this one shouldn’t have even registered on our radar.

Since there’s actually no study to review (!), we’ll walk through the news. When would you have changed the television station or tossed the newspaper aside?

According to the news, the researchers reviewed data on 184,418 post menopausal women and found that women who drank even just one to two drinks a day were 32% more likely to develop breast cancers of a certain type (estrogen-receptor and progesterone-receptor positive, or ER+/PR+). This study was said to provide evidence that alcohol is positively associated with breast cancer.

When hundreds of news outlets around the world report on a single study, out of the hundreds released each day, on exactly the same day and all saying exactly the same thing, you can be sure someone issued a press release. Sure enough, this paper came with a press release.

Please go to the link above to read the rest of her comments on this study and news coverage about it.

Blogs like hers give citizen journalism a good name.

One of the worst stories by a major news organization on a health care topic was turned in by CBS' 60 Minutes last Sunday with a piece it entitled on its website, "The Kanzius Machine: A Cancer Cure?"

The story was reviewed on HealthNewsReview.org and given one of the lowest ratings possible. The review summary stated, in part:

If the report were to be done and broadcast on 60 Minutes, it would have benefited considerably from additional context provided by other credible researchers. Did CBS look for and fail to find anyone skeptical of this technique? None was interviewed.

The story has elements that make it appealing as an act of infotainment: a lone-wolf outsider who can cure cancer with pie pans and hot dogs, a man motivated by his desire to help "hollow-eyed kids" with cancer, and hopeful researchers with impressive institutional affiliations, including a Nobel laureate said to have turned from skeptic to believer by the time he died from cancer.

But good stories don't always make good journalism. This is such a case.

The segment is likely to raise hopes, clearly prematurely if not falsely, of millions of people affected by cancer, or even cancer risk. This is the opposite of public service.

The most disturbing aspect of the segment was its one-sidedness, its lack of context and independent perspective. And given that these segments run about 15 minutes, CBS can't hide behind the excuse that this is TV and we don't have enough airtime to go into great depth.

Add Women's Health magazine to my list of publications guilty of disease-mongering by advocating tests that are not supported by evidence - recommendations that run counter to those of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force.

The article, "THE MEDICAL TESTS YOU SHOULD TAKE: Head-to-Toe Tune-Up" is not unlike those I've criticized on CNN, in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and in a number of other news outlets.

No source is given for the recommendations.

Journalists: when you promote testing and screening in healthy populations in the absence of evidence of benefit and in the presence of known harms you may be causing harm yourselves. And you're certainly stirring up the "worried well" to seek medical attention when they may not need it. We're already devoting 16% of the gross domestic product to health care.

I've reported many times on news organizations hyping medical technologies. But this past week, a medical journal - BMJ - did the same thing in its "news" section, presenting only the fantastic potential of robotic surgery without any evidence - any quantification - of potential benefits and harms and without any discussion of costs.

The BMJ "news" story was entitled, "Robotic prostatectomy transmitted live to engineers to promote collaboration."

Read my letter and that of a British oncologist in response to that article. I wrote:

"...the story was completely devoid of any data.

We learn that robotic radical prostatectomies are much more common in the US than in the UK but we learn nothing about outcomes.

We learn that there are ethical issues but none is specified.

We learn that a urologist believes robotic surgery has several advantages. But those are not quantified. What does "better results" mean?

We learn that "patients recover more quickly" but we're not told how many patients. We learn of "better cancer control" without any definition of that term.

Ditto for reported claims of more precision, "less collateral damage, resulting in less blood loss, faster recovery, and fewer complications." No numbers.

I'm trying to teach my health journalism students, "No numbers? No story." I hope they weren't reading this week's BMJ "news" section."

Shannon Brownlee on disease-mongering.