Many news stories on last week’s study on digital mammography in the New England Journal of Medicine were shallow and incomplete.
Many ran with a single theme that digital mammograms are 15% to 28% more effective than traditional film mammograms in the detection of breast tumors in women younger than age 50, women with dense breast tissue and pre- or peri-menopausal women.
But I didn’t see any stories questioning how many cases of DCIS or ductal carcinoma in situ were picked up by digital mammograms. This pre-cancerous, pre-malignant “non-invasive” condition leaves women and their doctors in a quandary about treatment options since it’s not known how many stay non-invasive and how many go on to become invasive. If the new technology picks up more of these cases, it may be a double-edged sword.
Few stories carried any skepticism such as that reported in the Washington Post by a spokesperson for the National Breast Cancer Coalition: “”I think it is very misleading to tell people that digital mammography is a better alternative. We don’t know that yet. Catching more cancers doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to avoid more deaths from breast cancer”
Opinions on other issues in news, journals, PR, advertising, marketing
Why fact-checking is not enough to prevent the spread of misleading health care news...@HealthNewsRevu https://t.co/fzC2JbDYGV
Simply fact-checking an article "fails to capture questions of nuance and context that arise – or should arise – whenever evaluating medical evidence." https://t.co/HrYkGj12q1
We wrote only about efforts that label themselves as “fact-checking” projects. You’ll see that if you read the piece.
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