Please see my article on the Poynter Institute website today. It touches on cheerleading in coverage of health news, on commercialism in health news coverage, on widespread conflicts of interest in the dissemination of health news, on the power of words in health news, and on some of the good things being done to improve […]
1/5/2005Journalists should scrutinize their state legislatures’ handling of Medicaid in 2005. Feeling squeezed by the feds, states are caught in a bind. Minnesota Public Radio quoted the state finance commissioner: “Health and human services is growing 20 percent from one biennium to the next. We don’t have revenues growing at that rate. And that’s a […]
12/21/2004Stories like today’s about naproxen causing “a 50 percent greater risk of heart attacks and stroke than placebo” can be meaningless if they don’t provide the ABSOLUTE risk. The 50% figure is the relative risk — naproxen’s rate relative to placebo. But we’re not told the ABSOLUTE rate: how many people actually had heart attacks […]
12/6/2004See my review article in this week’s British Medical Journal. http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/329/7478/1352
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
Tips & Resources for Analyzing Health Care Claims
