To back up our goal of improving the public dialogue about health care interventions, we offer these tips for analyzing studies and health care claims and interventions, aimed at helping both journalists and consumers.
We also offer writing tips for health care journalists that touch upon some of these issues.
- Absolute vs. relative risk
- Animal & lab studies
- Biohype bibliography
- Be careful with composite endpoints/outcomes
- Conflicts of interest in healthcare, academics, public relations and journalism
- Phases of drug trials
- Medical devices
- FDA approval not guaranteed
- Is the claim legit or just health fear-mongering?
- How much will it cost?
- Intention-to-treat analysis
- NNT: number needed to treat
- Non-inferiority trials
- Observational studies: association vs causation
- Odds ratios
- “Off-label” drug use and marketing
- News from scientific meetings
- Small studies: Be vigilant when writing about them and skeptical when reading about them
- Mixed messages about statistical significance
- Subgroup analysis: 3 reasons to be suspicious
- Surrogate markers may not tell the whole story
Comments (2)
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Kathi Mestayer
November 28, 2016 at 4:20 pmJust wondering if you are familiar with ConsumerLab.com. They claim to conduct independent testing of nutritional supplements for content and solubility. Are they solid?
Kevin Lomangino
November 28, 2016 at 9:32 pmKathi,
We are not familiar with that organization and, unfortunately, can’t offer any advice on the quality of information they provide.
Kevin Lomangino
Managing Editor
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