The following is a guest post by Harold DeMonaco, MS, one of our expert reviewers on HealthNewsReview.org, and a frequent guest blogger on this site. ———————- The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) will hold its annual meeting starting on May 31st in Chicago, Illinois. While we have consistently cautioned against over reading the abstracts [...]
For at least the second time in a week, we have seen polar opposite news coverage on a medical science story. Fox News reported on a paper in the journal Cell: “In a major medical breakthrough, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have for the first time ever successfully converted human skin [...]
Kudos to Julie Appleby, Kaiser Health News, and the Washington Post for publishing the story, “Hospitals promote screenings that experts say many people do not need.” It’s a story that is reported infrequently, even though it could be reported any time in almost any city in the US – the practice is that widespread. The [...]
On the Croakey blog from Australia, Dr. Tim Senior, a general practitioner working in Aboriginal health, provides advice for anyone reporting on medical tests (or indeed anyone wanting to understand the media’s reporting of screening and test issues). He was motivated by something he read in the paper: Last week, the Sydney Morning Herald went [...]
Newspapers in the UK went nuts today with stories about “Nobel-worthy” research and “breakthrough” and “cure.” Interestingly, the story is slow to crack US news organizations yet. The Guardian: Back pain breakthrough could eliminate need for major operations The Daily Mail: Antibiotics costing just £114 may cure chronic back pain in 40% of patients in [...]
Fact: the US spends a far greater percentage of the Gross Domestic Product on health care than any other country on earth. Suggestion: trends like the following, and news stories about these trends, may be a big reason why. Caution: You need to sit through a 15-second commercial before seeing the news video, which, itself [...]
I’m honored to be invited to present the 16th Annual Mates David and Hinna Stahl Memorial Lecture at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey tomorrow (April 23). My topic: “Addressing the Ethical Morass at the Intersection of Media, Medicine and Public Health.” (Addendum on April 25: now [...]
It’s disappointing to learn from the NIH website this weekend: The 2013 Medicine in the Media course has been cancelled due to sequestration. For journalists interested in learning how to evaluate evidence and improve their reporting on studies, this is the finest workshop I’ve attended. Disclosure: I have appeared as an instructor at this workshop [...]
We often write about incomplete, imbalanced stories we see about screening tests. My local paper, the Star Tribune, published a doozie this weekend. The online story headline was: Baby boomers embracing colonoscopies In print, it was: Look At The Upside The subhead was the same in either format: “From highway billboards to celebrities, everyone is [...]
The story: A company, Exact Sciences, announces (but doesn’t publish) results of a study of its experimental Colo-guard colon cancer screening test that looks for changes in DNA in stool samples. The New York Times splashes: “Noninvasive Cancer Test Is Effective, Study Finds.” But the 2nd sentence reads: “Still, the results fell short of investor [...]
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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