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 Associationincluded 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 »
A German physician wrote me about this, so while CNN may have an international reach, it’s not always with an adoring audience.
The physician was reacting to the weekend “Paging Dr. Gupta” program, which Dr. Gupta referred to once as “SG, MD.” The first thing that struck me was his introduction, in which he said:
“I’m your doctor. I’m also your coach.”
Later in the program he said:
“Think of this as your appointment. No waiting. No insurance necessary.”
I find this very troubling. He’s not my doctor. He’s not my coach. When I watch a “news” program, it’s NOT my medical appointment. It’s supposed to be news, not medical advice.
But that’s not what the German physician wrote to me about, so I kept watching (the segment in question appears about 5 minutes and 30 seconds deep, and after the 30-second commercial you have to watch to get there):
Gupta reacted to a viewer’s message on Twitter in which the tweep asked: “Does anyone know a ‘miracle’ treatment for ovarian cancer?” Read more »
Uterine fibroids are benign growths on the muscular wall of the uterus. They can be tiny in size (like a marble) or grow huge and fill up the entire uterine cavity. Some fibroids are as large as a five-month pregnancy. There are certain facts that women should know about uterine fibroids. Read more »
This study confirms previous studies which found that ovarian cancer, long thought to be a silent disease in its early stages, does indeed have symptoms. The problem is that those symptoms – bloating, urinary frequency, pelvic pain, early satiety – are common, non-specific and, according to this new study, 99% of the time not due to an underlying ovarian cancer.
That’s good news, of course, for women with these symptoms. But bad news for those hoping for a means of early detection for ovarian cancer, since early symptom recognition is neither sensitive nor specific enough to be useful as a screening test on a population basis. Read more »
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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…
Uterine fibroids are benign growths on the muscular wall of the uterus. They can be tiny in size (like a marble) or grow huge and fill up the entire uterine cavity. Some fibroids are as large as a five-month pregnancy. There are certain facts that women should know about uterine fibroids. 
