September 25th, 2010 by GarySchwitzer in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion, Research
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One part of the health care law that took effect this week is widely reported as “establishing a menu of preventive procedures, such as colonoscopies, mammograms and cholesterol screening, that must be covered without co-payments.” For example, one of my local papers, the [St. Paul, Minnesota] Star Tribune, wrote: “Some people will no longer have to pay for copays, coinsurance or meet their deductibles for preventive care that’s backed up by the best scientific evidence.” (emphasis added)
That phrase should always include a huge asterisk, like the one hung on Roger Maris’ 61st home run. The best scientific evidence according to whom?
Time magazine reports, “Procedures, screenings and tests that are considered ‘preventive’ will be determined by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the Centers for Disease Control (for vaccines) and the Health Resources and Services Administration.” As written, that is incorrect and inaccurate at worst and misleading at best. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
September 21st, 2010 by GarySchwitzer in Better Health Network, News, Opinion, Research
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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*
September 13th, 2010 by Iltifat Husain, M.D. in Better Health Network, News, Research
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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*
September 8th, 2010 by GarySchwitzer in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Health Tips, News, Opinion, Research
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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*
September 3rd, 2010 by GarySchwitzer in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Health Tips, News, Opinion, Quackery Exposed, Research
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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.”
*This blog post was originally published at Gary Schwitzer's HealthNewsReview Blog*
