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How The Swedish Mammography Study Should’ve Been Analyzed

We reviewed four stories on the Swedish mammography study that appeared in the journal Cancer last week. Three of the four stories gave a pretty clear indication that there were methodological concerns about the Swedish research (of the four reviewed, only HealthDay offered no such hint):

• 4th paragraph of AP story: “The new study has major limitations and cannot account for possibly big differences in the groups of women it compares.”

• 1st paragraph of LA Times blog story: “Critics charged that the study was poorly designed and potentially vastly misleading.”
• 2nd sentence of NY Times story: “Results were greeted with skepticism by some experts who say they may have overestimated the benefit.”

But none of the stories did a very complete job of explaining those potential limitations. Because of the confusion that must be occurring in the minds of women — especially those in their 40s — this is a time in which journalism must rise to the need and do a better job of evaluating evidence and helping readers make sense of what appear to be conflicting findings.

I was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when the study was published and had the chance to talk about it with former U.S. Preventive Services Task Force member, and a recognized thought leader on issues of prevention and especially of screening tests, Dr. Russell Harris, Professor and Director of the Health Care and Prevention Concentration of the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Public Health. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*

Why Did It Take Five Weeks For The New York Times To Correct Its Alzheimer’s Test Assertion?

I have a lot of catching up to do after being in Europe for just 4 days. But I can’t let this one go by without comment. In fact, this issue was one of the first ones raised by German journalists I met with in Dortmund this week. Don’t think people around the world don’t notice the good AND the bad in American health/medical/science journalism — especially by The New York Times.

The Times took a long time (five weeks) to comment on what critics — including me, Paul Raeburn, Charlie Petit and many other journalists (including Times’ ombudsman Arthur Brisbane) — wrote about Gina Kolata’s August 10 piece on a “100% accurate” Alzheimer’s test. But [on September 16th] the paper published a correction. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*

iStethoscope App Does Not Replace A Doctor’s Stethoscope

An article in The Guardian, the popular British newspaper, on an iPhone medical app that attempts to replicate the stethoscope starts out as:

The stethoscope — medical icon, lifesaver and doctor’s best friend — is disappearing from hospitals across the world as physicians increasingly use their smartphones to monitor patients’ heartbeats.

More than 3 million doctors have downloaded a 59p application — invented by Peter Bentley, a researcher from University College London — which turns an Apple iPhone into a stethoscope.

It’s obvious to those intimate with medicine that “3 million doctors” using this app was a ridiculous number. Unfortunately, it took The Guardian one full week to realize this egregious error — they meant to say “3 million overall downloads” –- but by then the news had been disseminated to hundreds of news websites, blogs, and potentially millions of readers. Leading readers to infer that with “3 million physician downloads” the medical community had signed off on the app.

The story went on to say:

Experts say the software, a major advance in medical technology, has saved lives and enabled doctors in remote areas to access specialist expertise.

Lets be clear what this application does. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at iMedicalApps*

JAMA’s Breast And Ovarian Cancer Article: Getting The Facts Straight

Journalist Andrew Holtz has been a colleague for longer than probably either one of us wants to remember. He is currently one of our story reviewers on HealthNewsReview.org. In fact, he was one of the reviewers on four stories we analyzed last week on the same study. He thought there were some important take-home messages that rose above the walls of our formal systematic review, so he wrote this guest blog post, and we thank him for it:

The Sept. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association included an article that is likely to have a strong influence on the advice given to women who have a very high risk of breast and ovarian cancer linked to mutations of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Of the four stories we reviewed, only the AP report scored well on our review criteria.

I know what my first journalism professor, Marion Lewenstein, would have done with at least two of the stories: Given them an “F” for factual errors without further consideration of their merits. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*

Prevention Magazine’s Inaccurate “Coffee Cures” Story

The September issue of Prevention magazine inaccurately headlines the story “4 Ways Coffee Cures.” There’s no solid proof that coffee cures anything — unless some of you cure bacon with java, which I don’t want to know about.

What the story (below) did was to try to present a cute little graphic summary of observational studies that show a statistical association between increasing coffee consumption and fewer early deaths, fewer deaths from heart attack, fewer cases of dementia, and fewer cases of type 2 diabetes.

But such observational studies (they actually never cite the source — I’m just giving them the benefit of the doubt that they’re citing observational studies) CAN’T establish cause and effect, therefore it’s inaccurate for the story to use terms like “cure,” “protective,” and “lowers (or reduces or slashes) your risk.” Besides being inaccurate, such stories fail to educate readers. They mislead.

We ask the editors of Prevention to read and understand our guide “Does the Language Fit the Evidence? Association versus Causation.

Prevention coffee cures.jpg

*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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