December 13, 2013

Health care news year-end stories are starting to pour in…stay tuned for mine

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California Healthline lists “Three of the most over-hyped health care reform stories of 2013.”

The BMJ has begun its Christmas 2013 articles. This week, they offered:

Were James Bond’s drinks shaken because of alcohol induced tremor?
The hospital clock that was telling a patient to die
“Nominative determinism” – should your surname carry a health warning?
and more, with more to come next week

TIME listed its “Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs” of the year. Listing the overhyped “newborn functionally cured of HIV” story as the #1 breakthrough is a reach, as we and many others noted when the announcement was made in March.

Buzzfeed compiles “All The Things That Cured Cancer in 2013.” It’s an amazing display of screenshots from The Daily Mail Online:

“Can the sun cure cancer?”
“How polio could cure brain cancer”
“Does Jasper the rescue dog have a cure for cancer?”
And a rotating list at the bottom of the post that flies by so fast it’s difficult to transcribe, but I swear I saw headlines on Botox, robots, Ecuadarian dwarfs, and a visit to the Pope

Buzzfeed also posted “17 Ridiculous Daily Mail Headlines,” several of which were health care related:

Woman, 63, ‘becomes PREGNANT in the mouth’ with baby squid after eating calamari
So miracles DO happen! As flesh-eating bug left toddler at death’s door, his mother turned to prayer…and just look at him now
And then there was this one:

I have begun work on my 4th annual year-ender on health care PR crap I receive. For the past three years, it has been one of my most popular posts with our readers. It seems to be a perfect way to top off another year of hype, overstatement, under-disclosure, emphasizing/exaggerating benefits while ignoring/minimizing harms, and generally adding to the tsunami of health care misinformation that washes over the public every day of every year. I promise not to disappoint Stay tuned for this post sometime next week.

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