Last week the NBC Today Show presented a series it called “Mini Medical Miracles.”
Were you waiting for news on cancer? Heart disease? Diabetes? Infectious diseases?
Sorry. What you got was baldness, insomnia, dandruff and wrinkles.
But NBC called the approaches “miracles” and “breakthroughs.” Man, that’s what we need is a good miracle for dandruff and wrinkles.
Anchor Matt Lauer led into the wrinkles story by asking “Could having a new laser treatment in your forties or fifties prevent you from ever needing a facelift?”
Who says that anyone needs a facelift? Facelifts are a matter of want, not need.
47-million uninsured is a matter of need.
Lauer and NBC medical editor Dr. Nancy Snyderman could barely contain their enthusiasm for the laser “treatment.”
(Snyderman:) “This is going to be in your doctor’s office soon.”
(Lauer:) “interesting. And anything that keeps people away from the knife. I mean, that’s major surgery.”
(Snyderman:) “I think you can say to people, this is a preemptive strike and it’s taking care of your skin and you can avoid a real operation. There will be a lot of people, men and women, who will be interested.”
There was no discussion of evidence, no quantification of benefits or harms, no discussion of how long the approach has been tested nor in how many people.
Among our systematic story reviews, the story is one of only 10 of the first 500 stories reviewed that got a score of 0.
Oh, for the good old Today Show days of Dave Garroway and J. Fred Muggs, the chimp.
Opinions on other issues in news, journals, PR, advertising, marketing
There's pervasive media bias toward hyping treatment benefits while neglecting negative results & harms.
Big part of this is reliance on experts with financial &/or intellectual conflicts of interest.
Att'n journalists: Use this list 100 independent experts to correct imbalance https://t.co/Twzc1Sp8Vw
Even when stories get the facts right, they often fail to provide crucial context and caveats that would help audiences make sense of the news — or lack thereof, says @garyschwitzer of @HealthNewsRevu https://t.co/b7YO2fYt0a
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