This is our continuing look at excellence in writing about health care. The Five-Star Friday feature won’t appear every Friday, but whenever we can, and whenever we’ve collected enough gems to shine a light on. .
-0-
Fresh today, we published a criteria-driven 5-star review of a New York Times story, “2 Studies Back Guidelines for Wider Use of Statins.” It’s noteworthy that last Friday, we published another 5-star review of a New York Times story by the same reporter, Andrew Pollack.
-0-
We tip our hat to the following efforts that we have not previously written about.
Kristina Fiore wrote a MedPage Today column, “HypeWatch: ALS Death at the Funeral Home? Small numbers behind reported risk.” She wrote that a news release from BMJ may have raised undue alarm in funeral home directors about ALS. She pointed out limitation after limitation of the research pointing to this association.
Compare MedPage Today’s story with this one from NBC – “Study Strengthens Formaldehyde Link to Crippling Disease ALS” There was no independent expert perspective in the story. It just reported what the researchers said.
-0-
Cardiologists Rita Redberg (UC San Francisco) and Sanket S. Dhruva (Yale) co-authored a New York Times op-ed piece, “The F.D.A.’s Medical Device Problem.” Excerpt: “Legislation, disingenuously titled the 21st Century Cures Act….would subject millions of Americans to unsafe or untested medical devices.”
-0-
Overtreatment was the topic of overview treatment by Robert Pearl, MD, CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, in a Forbes blog post entitled, “Why So Much Of The Health Care We Deliver Is Unnecessary – And What We Can Do About It.”
-0-
If you publish a physician scorecard, you better wear steel underwear.
Pro Publica reported, “Making The Cut: why choosing right surgeon matters more than you know.” It was the output of a long-running investigation into complication rates by thousands of US surgeons, allowing the public to look up individual surgeons in an interactive scorecard.
The surgeon who blogs as the Skeptical Scalpel questioned the methodology. But he is not alone.
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