Cancer, journalism and skewed patient expectations
Once again, it appears that a reporter has found the cure for cancer. And that cure is the out-of-context anecdote. Gary Schwitzer spotted the latest offense, a CBS story on a pancreatic cancer vaccine, and Jessie Gruman of Prepared Patient Forum connected the dots to explain how such reporting contributes to the skewed patient view of cancer treatment success rates.
Panel: Media share blame for health-care costs
Filed under: Health care reform, Health journalism
The American Society of News Editors and the Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making brought experts and editors together to discuss the media’s role in the overscreening, overprescribing and overhyping that are helping drive up health care costs in America. Richard Karpel, ASNE’s executive director, reviewed what those assembled took away from the seminar:
According to FIMDM’s presenters, the media is culpable because it reports too many stories focused on “breakthroughs” and “miracle cures,” indulges too often in light, feel-good, news-you-can-use features, and frequently publishes inaccurate, unbalanced stories that fail to ask the right questions or seek verification from independent sources.
AHCJ member Gary Schwitzer was there to share what he’s learned as a critic of health coverage, you can find a PDF of his presentation here. Presentations from the other speakers – who looked at things like disease-mongering, screenings, treatments for lower-back pain and pharmaceuticals – are available as well.
Schwitzer’s HealthNewsReview blog wins award
MedGadget, the “Internet journal of emerging medical technologies,” announced that AHCJ member Gary Schwitzer’s HealthNewsReview blog, won Best Medical Weblog of 2009.
From the announcement:
The winner of the Best Medical Weblog of 2009 is Gary Schwitzer’s HealthNewsReview Blog. Gary used to be a professional health reporter. He is now a professor of journalism at University of Minnesota, focusing on medical reporting. Gary has become renowned for his critique of media’s coverage of health care topics. And that’s what his blog is mostly about: checking and correcting the weak, erroneous, and misleading reporting of medical science and industry on TV and in newspapers.
Other blogs recognized focus on narrative, clinical cases, health policy and ethics, medical technology and patient experience.
The awards are sponsored by Epocrates, a maker of medical software for personal digital assistants and smart phones.
Schwitzer’s year-end thoughts on health journalism
Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview.org and an associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism & Mass Communication, posted “10 trends in health care journalism going into 2010.” He looks back at the good, the bad, the ugly and the data, as well as looking toward the future and offering a few words of advice for health journalists.
Poignant story leaves out the evidence
A heartwarming story on CBS News about a child’s medical treatment was in fact “incomplete and imbalanced,” according to Gary Schwitzer, on his HealthNewsReview blog.
Schwitzer, as regular Covering Health readers know, is an associate professor in the University of Minnesota School of Journalism & Mass Communication and publisher of HealthNewsReview.org.
Among the holes he sees in the story, reported by Sanjay Gupta:
- No mention of the costs of treatment
- How the child’s placement on a transplant list was affected
- Why the device used is not FDA-approved
- A lack of evidence that the device and treatment saved her life
Be sure to read what Schwitzer did find out about the medical device that was used. As he says, “Stories about new medical technologies - even those with such an emotional personal anecdote - should deal with evidence, not hyperbole about one anecdote.”
Hockey, theater tickets for prostate screenings
Gary Schwitzer, professor at the University of Minnesota School of Journalism & Mass Communication and publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, writes about the Roswell Park Cancer Institute’s promotion of its “Prostate Club for Men,” complete with prizes for men who discuss screening.
As Schwitzer points out, there is no mention of the potential harms of prostate cancer treatment or the fact that some prostate cancers grow so slowly that they never produce symptoms or become life threatening. Instead, the club says the screening is “quick and simple, and it could save your life.”
The club’s Web site even carries a message from a local anchorman urging men to be screened for prostate cancer, again, with nothing about potential harms.
Business pushes screenings despite guidelines
Jeff Baillon, a reporter for KMSP-Minneapolis/St. Paul, saw Life Line’s ubiquitous mailers (here’s the one AHCJ’s Gary Schwitzer received) in which former Olympian Peggy Fleming urges people to go in for medical screening and decided to take a closer look at the company. Ohio-based Life Line sends a van to local neighborhoods and offers a variety of tests for a few hundred dollars.
Baillon and his crew, who went undercover for the occasion, found that the Life Line scans were so quick (as short as four minutes) that they wouldn’t yield good pictures, and would be more likely to turn up false positives and miss real problems. They also covered scans, like carotid artery scans, that guidelines generally advise against, and made no mention of government guidelines when scanning patients, even when prompted. For its part, Life Line, a for-profit business which screens about a million people every year and suggests tests even for low-risk groups, says they don’t “trick” customers and, in fact, actually help save lives.
Baillon’s piece:
Schwitzer: One-sided push for screening wrong
On his Schwitzer health news blog, University of Minnesota journalism professor, HealthNewsReview.org editor and AHCJ member Gary Schwitzer reminds journalists – in particular, CNN’s Howard Kurtz and Larry King – that even when you’re talking to prostate cancer survivors about screening for the disease, it’s “wrong to use a network television platform to give one-sided advice to an entire population of men without giving balancing information on harms.”
Reminding journalists that PSA screening might not always be a good thing, Schwitzer quotes the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force:
Potential harms from PSA screening include additional medical visits, adverse effects of prostate biopsies, anxiety, and overdiagnosis (the identification of prostate cancer that would never have caused symptoms in the patient’s lifetime, leading to unnecessary treatment and associated adverse effects). Much uncertainty surrounds which cases of prostate cancer require treatment and whether earlier detection leads to improvements in duration or quality of life.
Lieberman, Schwitzer on health reform, coverage
Filed under: Conflicts of interest, Health care reform, Health journalism, Health policy, Hot Health Headline
FAIR, a media watch group, interviewed AHCJ members Trudy Lieberman and Gary Schwitzer in an attempt to cut through the politicized hollering to the issues themselves. FAIR includes its own analysis of the recent health care coverage, calling for increased fact-checking and extra care when associating certain reform ideas and political associations.
Lieberman explained that, under all the noise, today’s debates are almost identical to those that took place during the Clinton-era push for health care reform. Politicians and industry mouthpieces said the same things and debate raged over the same options. This time around, Lieberman said, it looks like the lofty campaign for health reform has been downgraded to an effort to change and improve heath insurance.
While joining FAIR in pointing out some weaknesses in media coverage, Lieberman did point out a few pieces she regarded as noteworthy:
Every now and then I do see something really good. A year ago, NPR did a spectacular series on health care in five countries in Europe, and they did really good investigation and showed very clearly that people in those countries—France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK—were very, very happy with their coverage, and then they compared and contrasted it with someone in our country who had the same illness and showed the travails of getting care in the U.S. And then just this week, I found another excellent story, and this was in Business Week, and the reporters dug into the lobbying by United Health Care, which is the country’s largest insurer. And I think that’s very instructive about what kind of behind the scenes activities are going on by the lobbyists, and we should have more of those kind of stories.
In his interview, Schwitzer focused on his recent summary of the myriad shortcomings of health segments on morning shows.
Morning shows’ health news called dangerous
HealthNewsReview.org publisher and University of Minnesota Professor Gary Schwitzer writes that, through their ratings, his team has found an unfortunate trend of poor reporting on network morning shows such as ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today show and the CBS Early Show. In his post, Schwitzer looked at reviews for four popular topics: weight loss, paralysis and spinal injury, cardiovascular disease and new medical technologies. Of the 18 reviewed stories that fit into those four categories, none of them earned a rating of better than two out of five and and more than a quarter of them received no rating points at all.
In his post, Schwitzer catalogs the shows’ worst recurring offenses, writing that they:
- Unquestioningly promote new drugs and new technologies
- Feed the “worried well” by raising unrealistic expectations of unproven technologies that may produce more harm than good
- Fail to ask tough questions
- Make any discussion of health care reform that much more difficult
-
Spend a week at the CDC studying public health, meeting sources. Apply for the AHCJ-CDC Health Journalism Fellowships today!
- Reporting on the intersection of health, environment
- Tip sheet: Covering cuts to Medicare reimbursements
- Briefing: Reporting on health reform between now and 2014
- Covering high-risk insurance pools: Tips for reporters
- Health care reform has passed: What's next?
- Health and education: Covering these intersecting beats
- Reporting on the business of health care
- Health reporting resources for journalists on state and local government beats
