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 [...]
A new paper published in the Annals of Family Medicine, “Patients’ Expectations of Screening and Preventive Treatments,” concludes: “Patients overestimated the risk reduction achieved with 4 examples of screening and preventive medications. This tendency to overestimate benefits may affect patients’ decisions to use such interventions, and practitioners should be aware of this tendency when discussing [...]
Flip over the calender. October to November. Breast cancer awareness month morphs into Movember – the global publicity campaign subtitled “Changing the Face of Men’s Health.” The prominent publicity stunt is to have men grow facial hair to support – well, to support what exactly? The Movember website points to these “partners and programs we [...]
I don’t know it it’s Sandy fatigue or election angst, but it’s surprising to me that more than 90 minutes have passed since an embargo lifted on this paper and few news organizations have reported on it – “Rescreening of Persons With a Negative Colonoscopy Result.” Here’s the paper’s conclusion: “Compared with the currently recommended [...]
A perspective piece in the Archives of Internal Medicine by Dr. Vinay Prasad of the Medical Oncology Branch of the National Cancer Institute tells a sad tale of what is headlined, “An Unmeasured Harm of Screening.” It’s a story of a 65-year old man who was screened for abdominal aortic aneurysm with ultrasound followed by [...]
You judge.Two significantly different frames were used to tell the story of a paper in The Lancet. The Associated Press (AP) headlined it: Mammograms: For 1 life saved, 3 overdiagnosed. Excerpt: “It’s clear that screening saves lives,” said Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research U.K. “But some cancers will be treated that would never [...]
We break from Pink Month for a moment to turn to prostates. CBS certainly is – with several spots in its “CBS Cares” campaign. If CBS cares so much, perhaps it could introduce some shared decision-making messages into its campaign instead of its imbalanced, heavy-handed, non-evidence-based promotion of prostate cancer screening. A friend who admits [...]
Call it a retraction. Call it a correction. Call it important to correct the record. Back in January, I led the charge in criticizing ABC’s Bill Weir for his report on Dr. David Agus’ book, “The End of Illness,” and Weir’s claim that a CT scan Agus recommended may have saved Weir’s life. You can [...]
In The Atlantic, physician-writer John Henning Schumann publishes, “On The Sordid Sale of Screening Tests.” Meantime, the final day of the 2012 edition of the NIH Medicine in the Media workshop wraps up, and Dr. Barry Kramer is giving his stalwart “The Logic of Cancer Screening – The Clash Between Intuition & Medical Science” talk. [...]
In the Guardian newspaper, UK physician and writer Margaret McCartney wrote, “Private health screening tests are oversold and under-explained: Health screening can cause more harm than it prevents, so companies have a duty to provide full information to customers.” In the article, she introduced a new website called PrivateHealthScreening.org. She writes that: “…out of frustration [...]
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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