I attended and spoke at the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference in Barcelona last week. It drew a large international audience – including representatives from Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Norway, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland – an incomplete list, to be sure. Included among the attendees were three other people who work on HealthNewsReview.org: Alan Cassels, Dr. Saurabh Jha, and Dr. Jim Rickert.
The topic of overdiagnosis is now drawing so much attention that one session was entitled, “Around the world in 80 names: exploring global variation in terminology pertaining to ‘preventing overdiagnosis.’ ” Here’s a slide from that session:
As the slide suggests, there are a lot of different concerns represented under the overdiagnosis banner and it has no single, broadly accepted definition. Some suggest “too much medicine” as a catch-all phrase for representing the issue to the public.
Peruse the program with me and you’ll see the wide-ranging topics that were discussed in an overdiagnosis context: osteoporosis (bone density screening), overuse of MRI, preterm labor overdiagnosis, PSA screening, mammography screening, cervical cancer screening, colorectal cancer screening, abdominal aortic aneurysm screening, genetic screening, ADHD, cardiac genomics, dementia, amyloid PET scans, thyroid cancer, polycystic ovary syndrome, low back pain, etc. This is a woefully incomplete list from a 3-day conference. If you follow us regularly, you know that we’ve touched on most of these themes in what we’ve written through the years.
And then there was my 90-minute session, “Pernicious Promotion of Overdiagnosis in PR News Releases.” It was not difficult for me to come up with examples from our 18 months of reviewing 250 PR news releases so far.
At the conference, I recorded a couple of podcasts interviews, which I’ll be producing over the next few days/weeks, touching on some of the innovative media approaches that some researchers have begun taking to address overdiagnosis issues. Stay tuned.
Opinions on other issues in news, journals, PR, advertising, marketing
Shout out to @HealthNewsRevu (that has had such an impact on how journalists report industry-sponsored medical misinformation) from @ShannonBrownlee and @JeanneLenzer1 on today's Viral Misinformation webinar
#COVID19
Don’t believe everything you hear, kids.
“What in the world justifies rushing a 348-word story to publication on a Sunday without doing extra research and reporting? Just because a scientist said it? COVID-19 journalism that devolves to that level of dreck is dangerous.”
🔥👇 https://twitter.com/garyschwitzer/status/1268175065478320131
.@Reuters: why rush to publish a 348-word story claiming #COVID19 is losing potency without doing extra research and reporting? Just because a scientist said it? #COVID19 journalism that devolves to that level of dreck is dangerous. https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2020/06/reuters-report-is-another-classic-case-study-in-how-not-to-cover-covid-19-news/
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