The cover story of the March edition of Consumer Reports is “The cancer tests you need – and those you don’t.“ You need a subscription to access the full content, but here’s a glimpse of what’s inside. The headings are: Overselling cancer tests A new understanding of the disease Misleading statistics Screening harms Colon-cancer screening [...]
Flu Follies: CNN’s Piers Morgan Falls Ill Days After Getting Flu Shot On The Air From Dr. Oz. Should Journalists Cite Material from Predatory Journals? – Scholarly Open Access blog. Eve Harris, who recently took a fulltime job as a patient navigator at UCSF, published her “coming out” piece, as she calls it - “Skin [...]
Two months ago, I read on the BMJ website “Citizens’ jury disagrees over whether screening leaflet should put reassurance before accuracy.” I’ve been following some of the controversies in the British National Health Service’s breast screening program for some time. An example here. I asked Angela Coulter, PhD, to write a guest blog post about [...]
A new analysis published in the Annals of Family Medicine,”Primary Care Physicians’ Use of an Informed Decision-Making Process for Prostate Cancer Screening,” found that 24% of primary care physicians who responded to a survey said they ordered screening without discussing it with patients. How’s that for shared decision-making? Fewer than 48% of those surveyed said [...]
We’ve been following claims for Cyberknife “knife-less surgery” for a long time. See search results from our blog. We’ve seen billboards promoting it in the metropolitan health care market we live in. And big East Coast medical centers promoting it at subway stops. But only recently did we start noticing many TV commercials promoting [...]
Read or listen to Richard Knox’s piece. Among several strong elements in his story, he profiles Shannon Brownlee’s decision to stop having mammograms: Health writer Shannon Brownlee of the New America Foundation says the issue is a prime example of what she calls American medicine’s tendency to overdiagnose and overtreat disease. She’s the author of [...]
The Star Tribune is going to take a lot of criticism for its story about a local TV news personality’s cancer foundation “targeting high school sporting events,” but I think this is important and legitimate cross-town journalism about journalism ethics. The story involves longtime Minneapolis TV personality Randy Shaver who has danced back and forth [...]
The Toronto Star reported, “New breast cancer drug heralded as breakthrough.” Let’s be clear about this at the outset: we’ve interviewed countless women with breast cancer and we share their yearning for breakthroughs. But we also share the healthy skepticism of many of the breast cancer survivors we’ve met about jumping to early conclusions about [...]
Dr. Laura Berman, self-proclaimed “star” of “In The Bedroom with Dr. Laura Berman,” was allowed to post this on the Chicago Sun-Times website regarding Movember and mustaches and prostate cancer: “Men greatly underestimate their risk of prostate cancer. Even though one in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, almost two-thirds [...]
There has been much reaction to a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, “Effect of Three Decades of Screening Mammography on Breast-Cancer Incidence.” It is at times like this that a lone blogger like me on a holiday weekend can easily feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of trying to capture [...]
This story focuses on a family that may have a rare genetic mutation that increases their risk of heart disease. Unfortunately, the “rare” part wasn’t mentioned until 1,600 words into this 2,100 word story.
While this story adequately addressed 7 of our 10 criteria, the 3 on which it missed were significant omissions, yet could have been easily addressed.
Solid medical conference reporting, with many expert interviews and good context provided. Goes far beyond the conference presentation itself.
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