Walt Bogdanich and a team of reporters produced a powerful package entitled, "Radiation Offers New Cures, and Ways to Do Harm."

He profiled two people who died - one who received seven times his prescribed dose and one who absorbed "27 days of radiation overdoses, each three times the prescribed amount." But the story also was built on months of research and examination of thousands of pages of public and private records and dozens of interviews.

What makes this so important is that, as the story explains, Americans receive far more medical radiation than ever before. And some of it comes from technologies about which there is tremendous professional enthusiasm - such as IMRT or intensity-modulated radiation therapy. "Without a doubt," the story states, "radiation saves countless lives and serious accidents are rare. But patients often know little about the harm that can result when safety rules are violated and ever more powerful and technologically complex machines go awry."

I'm not going to post more excerpts here because you should read the entire piece and note the other elements of this rich multimedia package - video, interactive graphics, photos, and information graphics.

Powerful, tragic, important. Terrific journalism.

The Chicago Tribune, in the middle of a good story with a catchy headline - "The United States of Anxiety: Worried Sick Over Our Health Care" - includes some vital messages:

"Polls show voters worry a lot about health care and how much they spend on it. Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama have responded by peddling plans they claim will help more Americans attain and afford care.

But neither candidate has focused publicly on treating the real problem: why American medical care costs too much and isn't as good as it should be.

We waste money on tests and visits to specialists that don't make us better. We spend big to add a few weeks or months to the inevitable end of a dying patient's life. We use expensive technology at any cost, even when it exceeds our needs, and we fail to encourage simple, proactive steps that would keep us healthier and save us money. We often don't know which treatments work the best, so we err on the side of too much care, for too much cost, with sometimes damaging consequences.

As a result, Americans pay significantly more for medical care than anyone else in the industrialized world. Every year, we spend a bigger chunk of our family budget on doctor bills, hospital stays and prescription drugs. Yet we trail several other nations in health-care quality, access and efficiency.

Most Americans have long assumed that more is better when it comes to their health: more doctors, more tests, more hospital time. But a decade of comprehensive studies suggests that all those visits and tests and hospital stays are often a waste of money—and sometimes a drag on our well-being."

As we flip the calendar over from a very busy May into a sunny June, I want to reflect on the common themes in the blog entries of the past four days:

1. My PLoS Medicine article, “How Do US Journalists Cover Treatments, Tests, Products and Procedures? An Evaluation of 500 Stories.�

2. The Commonwealth Fund analysis on variations in child health care across the US.

3. Another "more care isn't always better care" study - this time in JAMA.

4. Consumer Reports releasing an online tool using Dartmouth Atlas data to allow you to look at aggressive vs. conservative care - comparing hospitals on this scale.

Connect the dots. Jack Wennberg's work rings through these themes.

Inexplicably widespread variations exist in the way health care is practiced in this country and more data comes in every day. More evidence also comes in every day that "more and newer isn't always better" in health care. And journalists are spending too much time on the "more" and the "newer" rather than on questions of evidence, costs, quality and access to care.

As a result, many consumers aren't getting much smarter at a time when some policymakers, employers and insurance company marketing folks push "consumer-driven health care" plans. Americans don't know what they're buying with the health care dollar and giving them more "skin in the game" doesn't make them smarter - only makes them hurt more - if they're not educated in the dots.

Don Berwick and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement have done important work in addressing health care quality issues. But they may have overstepped the boundaries of evidence with a recent study that drew a lot of news coverage, claiming that hospitals they worked with saved over 122,000 lives by cutting down on errors and improving care.

"The Numbers Guy" column by Carl Bialik in the Wall Street Journal says the studies warrant a second opinion. Bialik quotes Dr. Bob Wachter of UCSF, author and lecturer on medical errors: ""I don't think it saved 122,300." He added that, like in a political campaign, the health-care campaign used "statistics selectively to try to mobilize your base to do good. It's understandable. It's not good science."

Dr. Gil Welch of Dartmouth and the VA said, "I think there's been a tendency in the errors business to first overstate the size of the problem, and now, I'm afraid, to overstate the effect of interventions on the other side."

Read Bialik's full article. It does a good job of questioning claims and pointing out how well-intentioned advocates may be driven by passion more than by evidence, and how journalists can easily get sucked into the vortex. (Bialik points out how the Wall Street Journal reported the Berwick claims, along with the Associated Press, U.S. News & World Report and many other media.)