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 [...]
Former CBS and CNN journalist Deborah Potter writes on her NewsLab site: “Let’s start with the syndicated stories TV networks pump out to their affiliates, a service they’ve provided for decades. One of my first jobs in television many years ago was to log the video offerings from ABC on the cutely named DEF or [...]
I’m late on this because I was traveling when the latest events in question occurred, but Paul Raeburn on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker has a nice wrapup – “British newspaper gives disgraced vaccine critic forum to attack government for measles epidemic” – with background and links. The British paper, The Independent, published a statement [...]
Jim Thornton’s story is about prostate cancer screening. The six million dollar figure refers to the cost of screening for and treating prostate cancer. Excerpt: “At $1,000 or more per biopsy, the cost to U.S. health care for prostate biopsies alone is estimated to run into the billions each year. Whenever cancer is found, expenses [...]
A paper published in BMJ Open, “Male pattern baldness and its association with coronary heart disease: a meta-analysis,” drew lots of news coverage. When I began to scan some of the news, I scratched my head, pulled out some hair, tousled what was left, and finally decided I had to address some of what I [...]
Julia Belluz writes the Science-ish blog - a joint project of Maclean’s, the Medical Post and the McMaster Health Forum in Toronto. This week she reviewed Gwyneth Paltrow’s new book, “It’s All Good: Delicious, Easy Recipes That Will Make You Look Good and Feel Great.” Excerpts: “Science-ish was immediately stung by the panorama of pseudoscience premises [...]
It’s difficult to do an overview of melanoma drug research in a relatively brief story. But this story did a solid job.
Better than a competing piece by Reuters but still a little short on some details about this asthma drug study.
An adequate summary of this asthma drug trial’s design doesn’t make up for the overly optimistic tone about the drug’s future. A New York Times story was better.
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