Add the New York Daily News to my list of news organizations taking an unhealthy advocacy stance for screening tests.
A promotion in the paper screams out, “Get your free prostate cancer screening, courtesy of the Daily News”:
Beginning on Father’s Day, New York’s hometown newspaper offers these free tests every year, because we believe we should help New Yorkers take care of themselves.
So far more than 120,000 men have taken our free tests, and almost 10,000 have found that they need further action.
The screening is quick and easily performed.
Let’s stop and break that down. More than 120,000 men have taken the free tests and almost 10,000 found they need further action? How many were false positives? How many faced further testing, treatment and anxiety that lead to nothing?
The screening is quick and easily performed? Does that mean that the decision about whether to have it should be quick and easy? Or should a man slow down and consider some of the cascading consequences of this “quick and easy blood test?”
Back to the newspaper promo:
The American Cancer Society recommends that men take the screenings from the age of 50, but high-risk males who include African American men and those with a family history of prostate cancer.
The Cancer Society may recommend that, but the group viewed as the “gold standard” in making preventive health recommendations, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, does not. USPSTF states:
The USPSTF found good evidence that PSA screening can detect early-stage prostate cancer but mixed and inconclusive evidence that early detection improves health outcomes. Screening is associated with important harms, including frequent false-positive results and unnecessary anxiety, biopsies, and potential complications of treatment of some cancers that may never have affected a patient’s health. The USPSTF concludes that evidence is insufficient to determine whether the benefits outweigh the harms for a screened population.
Why, oh why, don’t news organizations tell the other side of this story? Why don’t they tell the evidence-based side of the story, instead of playing on peoples’ fears to help sell newspapers?
Opinions on other issues in news, journals, PR, advertising, marketing
The tale of two “negative” studies. Or, how spin is applied to make research findings look more impressive. A must read. https://johnmandrola.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-two-negative-studies
The @nytimes chose to interview one of the editors of the @AnnalsofIM (publisher of this paper) who "gushed with extraordinary glee: It’s huge! There are very few things that reduce your mortality by 30%."
Turns out coffee is not one of those few things despite all that glee. https://twitter.com/garyschwitzer/status/1533202075928215558
Comments
Please note, comments are no longer published through this website. All previously made comments are still archived and available for viewing through select posts.
Comments are closed.
Our Comments Policy
But before leaving a comment, please review these notes about our policy.
You are responsible for any comments you leave on this site.
This site is primarily a forum for discussion about the quality (or lack thereof) in journalism or other media messages (advertising, marketing, public relations, medical journals, etc.) It is not intended to be a forum for definitive discussions about medicine or science.
We will delete comments that include personal attacks, unfounded allegations, unverified claims, product pitches, profanity or any from anyone who does not list a full name and a functioning email address. We will also end any thread of repetitive comments. We don”t give medical advice so we won”t respond to questions asking for it.
We don”t have sufficient staffing to contact each commenter who left such a message. If you have a question about why your comment was edited or removed, you can email us at feedback@healthnewsreview.org.
There has been a recent burst of attention to troubles with many comments left on science and science news/communication websites. Read “Online science comments: trolls, trash and treasure.”
The authors of the Retraction Watch comments policy urge commenters:
We”re also concerned about anonymous comments. We ask that all commenters leave their full name and provide an actual email address in case we feel we need to contact them. We may delete any comment left by someone who does not leave their name and a legitimate email address.
And, as noted, product pitches of any sort – pushing treatments, tests, products, procedures, physicians, medical centers, books, websites – are likely to be deleted. We don”t accept advertising on this site and are not going to give it away free.
The ability to leave comments expires after a certain period of time. So you may find that you’re unable to leave a comment on an article that is more than a few months old.
You might also like