Mary Chris Jaklevic is a reporter-editor at HealthNewsReview.org. She tweets as @mcjaklevic.
September marks National Prostate Health Month, when hospitals and urology practices push free prostate cancer screening.
It’s also when we at HealthNewsReview.org publish our annual analysis of why these promotions — and their “screening saves lives” message — are bad for men.
To help readers understand the issue more clearly, we’ve published an expanded toolkit primer that we hope gives consumers and journalists a solid base of knowledge about screening.
Our latest roundup on coercive prostate screening campaigns mentions enticements like game tickets and meet-and-greets with football pros.
But in fact, the misleading pitch that screening saves lives gets advanced year-round for a host of conditions such as breast cancer, head and neck cancer, skin cancer, heart disease, and lung cancer.
The slogan persists even as data mount on the harms of screening; as public health advocates blast community screening promotions as hurting consumers; and as patients increasingly are urged to make their own informed choices.
Screening involves testing people who don’t have symptoms of the disease, with the expectation that a few life-threatening cases will be detected early, and earlier will treatment will improve their outcomes. In other words, screening might save some people from dying of the disease.
But typically, vastly more people are harmed — by false alarms, unnecessary treatment, more testing, and invasive procedures — than are helped.
The physical, emotional, and financial harms of screening must be weighed against the potential benefit of saving a few lives, and it’s a numbers that game that is often tough to win.
So why do some providers continue to promote screening so eagerly? And what should we know that they aren’t they telling us?
The new primer addresses these questions:
You can find more tips for analyzing studies and health care claims in our TOOLKIT section.
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
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