Search Results for "alzheimer's hype"
Too Much Medicine: A small medical conference with a big impact
The Too Much Medicine (TMM) conference is small, but has a potentially huge impact. We cover plenty of medical conferences about heart disease, cancer, and dementia (to name a few) that trigger tsunamis of media coverage because they –quite obviously and understandably — affect millions of people and involve grave outcomes. But the TMM conference, wrapping […]
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Intensive blood pressure control and ‘dementia’: another mad rush to report incomplete SPRINT findings
After 12 years in which we’ve published more than 2,500 news story reviews, we’ve found that reports out of medical meetings are among the most superficial and imbalanced journalism that we evaluate. Study abstracts presented at these meetings are often pitched as urgent or a ‘breakthrough’, when actually they’re usually preliminary and yet to be […]
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Toilet Bowl Tuesday: A craptastic race to the bottom for misleading health news
Sunday’s Super Bowl supposedly represented the zenith of professional football: top players, in top form, playing at the top level. Anyone want to give me odds on any of the following news stories — which all showed up in our newsfeed before 9 AM today — winning some sort of Toilet Bowl for health news? […]
Salads keep your brain 11 years younger? What you need to know
A few years ago, the website Hairpin.com posted a photo essay that captured a slice of the silliness of some stock photo collections. Under a headline, but with no other words, there were simply 19 photos that matched the headline, “Women Laughing Alone With Salad.” But salad silliness isn’t limited to stock photo images. Last […]
2017 year-ender: Lots of interesting health news (if you’re a lab mouse)
Among the many things we might ask health care journalists to put on their to-do lists in 2018, dialing back on coverage of animal studies ranks near the top. Yet, we won’t be placing any bets: As with years past, 2017 was full of hyped-up headlines based on pre-clinical evidence. Big claims were made about memory […]
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Temple University again greases the clickbait machine with canola oil study
Scientists should be lauded for investigating health claims used to a market a product. But when preliminary findings are reported to the public without appropriate context, that’s a problem. And it’s one that we’ve seen twice in the past six months at Temple University. In June we criticized an overreaching university news release: “Temple study: […]
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American Diabetes Association’s Twitter fiasco: Does it matter to patients?
The American Diabetes Association (ADA) sparked a social media uproar at its annual conference in San Diego earlier this month when it restricted participants from posting photographs of slide presentations on Twitter: The response by conference attendees — especially those quite active on social media — was brisk, passionate, and hinted at “Orwellian” censorship. Medscape, […]
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Strip mall stem cells
If you had been in Salt Lake City last month, savoring your morning coffee, and watching this channel 4 morning show, you might have been treated to this video promising a “revolutionary” treatment that assures “you don’t have to live with back pain.” You’d also be assured that the doctor being interviewed, Dr. Kahn, works at the only […]
Why you should beware of those aiming to “separate fact from fiction” in nutrition research
One thing that is almost fundamental to living in the modern age is having someone tell you what to eat. Just this past weekend NPR informed us, “Eating More — Or Less — Of 10 Foods May Cut Risk Of Early Death.” Yet the myths that surround nutrition, food, vitamins and so on are legion, […]
12/3/2015Health News Watchdog podcasts
We began producing audio podcasts in August, 2015 because we wanted our users to have the opportunity to hear and to learn directly from a variety of people with different perspectives: expert commentary from physicians and researchers, smart patients reflecting on the impact of media messages, stand-out health care journalists, and other media analyses. The response […]
Friday gems – in case you missed them
We can’t do a Five Star Friday feature today because we didn’t have any five-star reviews to shine a light on. In fact, this week, after publishing 128 systematic criteria-driven news story reviews so far this year, we gave our first zero-star score of the year to a Washington Post diet story. We don’t like […]
2/18/2015British website gets “sassy” on Twitter about flawed health care journalism
London-based BuzzFeed reporter Jamie Ross writes, “The NHS Is Calling Out Journalists On Twitter For Getting Their Facts Wrong.” The NHS is the British National Health Service. The NHS contracts with a company called Bazian to look “Behind the Headlines” on health news stories. We’ve written several times about the project. For example: Rise in cancer […]
3 1/20/2015“Potential biomarker that could predict”? – caveats about psychiatric brain imaging & blogging about it
The following is a guest blog post by Susan Molchan, MD. Dr. Molchan is a psychiatrist in practice in Bethesda, Maryland. She also trained in nuclear medicine and did PET research at the National Institute of Mental Health, and worked as the program director for Biomarkers, Diagnosis, and Alzheimer’s Disease at the National Institute on […]
4th annual year-ender on health care PR crap
I don’t think all public relations messages about health care are crap. But most of what I see is. And I can’t stand seeing public relations that may end up hurting the public. The Public Relations Society of America’s code of ethics talks about serving the public good…and “a special obligation to operate ethically.” Hmm. […]
U-M oversees cutting-edge trial that offers hope in fight against Lou Gehrig’s disease
A beautifully written two-part report for which we offer only a few thoughts of constructive criticism.
