Gary Schwitzer, publisher & founder of HealthNewsReview.org

Gary Schwitzer

Gary Schwitzer has specialized in health care journalism since 1973 in his career in radio, television, interactive multimedia and web publishing.

He is the publisher and founder of HealthNewsReview.org, once leading a team that grew to 50 people who:

The project is now in a quiet state, after grant funding expired at the end of 2018. In the project’s first year, it was honored with several journalism industry awards – the Mirror Award, honoring those who “hold a mirror to their own industry for the public’s benefit,” and the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism. His blog – which is embedded within HealthNewsReview.org – was voted 2009 Best Medical Blog in competition hosted by Medgadget.com.

In 2013, Schwitzer was named to an Adjunct Associate Professor appointment from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

From 2001-2010, he was on the faculty of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota, teaching health journalism and media ethics, and earning tenure in 2007. He left that position to devote fulltime to HealthNewsReview.org.

In 2000, he was the founding Editor-In-Chief of the MayoClinic.com consumer health web site.

During the 1990’s, Gary produced groundbreaking shared decision-making videos for the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making based at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

In the ’80s, he worked for four years at the National Office of the American Heart Association in Dallas.

He was a television medical news reporter for 14 years, with positions at CNN in Atlanta, WFAA-TV in Dallas, and WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee. He was head of the medical news unit at CNN, leading the efforts of ten staff members in Atlanta and Washington, D.C. After leaving the television news business, he soon began to receive many requests to write or speak on the state of health care/medical journalism.

He served two terms as a member of the board of directors of the Association of Health Care Journalists for whom he authored the organization’s Statement of Principles. For that organization he also wrote a guide on how to report on medical research studies.

Schwitzer has written about the state of health journalism in JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, the World Health Organization bulletin, Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, BMJ, the American Journal of Bioethics, the Journal of Medical Internet Research, PLoS Medicine, Nieman Reports, Quill, Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter.org, The Daily Beast, The American Editor, and MayoClinic.com. In 2009, the Kaiser Family Foundation published and distributed his white paper on “The State of US Health Journalism.”

Teaching in Beijing

He has taught health journalism workshops at the NIH Medicine in the Media series, at the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT Medical Evidence boot camps, at Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) national conferences, at AHCJ chapters in NY, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco, and at National Cancer Institute (NCI) workshops in Rio de Janeiro, Guadalajara, San Juan, Beijing. and in New Delhi and Mumbai, India.

He gave a keynote address at the International Shared Decision Making conference in Lima, Peru in 2013 and delivered a plenary address at the National Medicines Symposium in Brisbane, Australia in 2014.  In 2015 and 2016, he spoke at the 3rd and 4th annual Preventing Overdiagnosis conferences at NIH and in Barcelona. In 2016 he also spoke at the Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research (PRIM&R) Advancing Ethical Research conference in Anaheim, CA, in the closing general session: Errors of Enthusiasm: Responsible Communication of Research Findings.

Visit this page for a more complete list of talks, workshops and presentations he has delivered in recent years.

In 2014, he was named one of 25 Champions of Shared Decision Making by the Informed Medical Decisions Foundation.  Also in 2014, the American Medical Writers Association honored him with the McGovern Award for preeminent contributions to medical communication. Rodale, Inc. named him to its inaugural “Rodale 100” list of “innovators who are changing the face of the health and wellness universe.”

What others have said:

Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, Harding Center for Risk Literacy, Berlin. said:

“You serve as kind of an ethical mirror to journalists and to everyone in the country and I only wish there would be more enterprises like yours and that people would listen. Then their eyes would be open when they hear another promise of ‘a great therapy’ or when they can’t tell the difference between advertising and real science.”

The editors of the journal PLoS Medicine wrote:

“Schwitzer’s alarming report card of the trouble with medical news stories is thus a wake-up call for all of us involved in disseminating health research-researchers, academic institutions, journal editors, reporters, and media organizations-to work collaboratively to improve the standards of health reporting.”

The Canadian Medicine blog said:

“Gary Schwitzer is one of the most astute and intelligent critics of misleading, erroneous and fear-mongering health reporting.”

The Seattle Times said:

“Schwitzer is one of the country’s leading authorities on what’s right and wrong about health coverage in the media.”

William Heisel, journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist, wrote:

“With the creation of HealthNewsReview.org, (Gary Schwitzer) has brought back nightmares of having your work marked up in red and posted on a corkboard for everyone to see.”

The top-rated KevinMD.com blog wrote:

“Gary Schwitzer is the foremost health media watchdog, with his organization rigorously monitoring the health content of major media.”

Susan Perry, on her MinnPost.com column referred to the HealthNewsReview.org project as:

“indispensable to consumers & journalists”

Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication

“Calm and thorough analysis of health news journalism from HealthNewsReview.org”

Former U.S. Senator David Durenberger (R-MN)

“Gary has become the ‘go-to’ guy for good reporting and actionable information. No one other than Gary is taking the time to create a standard of accuracy by which actionable information must be judged. So, every week I take my hat off to Gary.”

Association of Health Care Journalists “Covering Health” blog

“When Gary Schwitzer writes on the future of health journalism, his words carry the weight of a database loaded with more than 1,000 reviewed stories. Like Charles Darwin’s long study of barnacles, Schwitzer’s micro-level scrutiny of the industry has left him uniquely equipped to tackle the big picture stuff as well. Which is why, when he draws a line in the sand… we should probably listen.”

Dr. Steven Kussin, Director of The Shared Decision Center, wrote:

“Teaching Literacy and Numeracy: …When it comes to the media and medicine, all doctors should suggest patients register at Gary Schwitzer’s site https://www.healthnewsreview.org/ .”

Paul Raeburn, then editor of the Knight Science Journalism Tracker:

“I’m beginning to think that Schwitzer’s criteria for judging stories ought to be printed on wallet cards for reporters, like Miranda warnings, to remind them what questions to ask. I could use one of those myself.”

Publications (sole author unless otherwise noted)

Sampling of media interviews

Selected Awards/Recognition

2020 video for ~7,000 international journalists enrolled in Journalism in a pandemic course offered by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with the World Health Organization & UNESCO, with support from the Knight Foundation & the UN Development Program
2016 talk at U of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation

@HealthNewsRevu

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MedMtgNewsMedical Meeting News@MedMtgNews·

Monday at #ADA2021, an infectious disease epidemiologist, a journalist, and a researcher shared perspectives on communication of risk in the era of COVID-19: http://ow.ly/ROfR30rMeE7 @AstleyCM @garyschwitzer @berthahidalgo @ADA_DiabetesPro

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Shoutouts to @susan_bewley @drkevinknopf @MichaelBaum11 in this call for more than fawning coverage from press releases for these kinds of stories.

Also, linked history inside goes back 5 years just on Grail apparently trying to become Holy Grail. https://twitter.com/garyschwitzer/status/1408849696416841731

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Here we go again w/more news about “Blood test finds 50 types of cancer.” And here we see again what’s missing from most such news stories. https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2021/06/blood-test-finds-50-types-of-cancer-weve-been-down-this-path-before/

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