Coverage of bacon, cell phones doesn’t add up
Zoe Williams, a columnist for the UK’s Guardian, weighs in on coverage of two recent studies, saying that the Daily Mail “takes the role of the Friend Who Exaggerates.” Williams takes issue with how...
View ArticleNEJM article: Media partially to blame for slow adoption of cost-effective...
In a new “Perspectives” piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, Victor R. Fuchs, Ph.D., and Arnold Milstein, M.D., M.P.H., examine why cost-effective health care has been slow to catch on in the...
View ArticleDon’t fudge the facts on chocolate studies
Studies that support a link between chocolate and good health are popular with readers. But the reality is that most chocolate studies are observational in nature and are therefore limited in what they...
View ArticleFrailty affects quality of life, makes seniors more vulnerable
Image by Alex E. Proimos via flickr. The term “frailty” seems to be practically synonymous with aging. And while it’s true that adults naturally have a gradual physical decline as they age, not every...
View ArticleReturn to McAllen illustrates changes ACA has brought to health care system
Photo: Peter Dutton via Flickr In June 2009, Atul Gawande wrote an influential New Yorker article, about the community of McAllen, Texas, which has some of the highest per-capita Medicare costs in the...
View ArticleContext, context, context: How journalists can avoid confusing readers with...
Whatiguana via Wikimedia Commons A recent editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association explored the responsibility that journals have to public health in reporting on the association –...
View ArticleTip sheet series to focus on red flags to look for in medical studies
Photo: Stephen Ransom With thousands of medical studies published every day, it’s impossible to cover even 1 percent of them. When you can only choose a tiny fraction of studies to cover — particularly...
View ArticleResearch: Finesse, transparency key when reporting foodborne illness outbreaks
Photo: NIH Image Gallery via FlickrSalmonella bacteria invade an immune cell. A mainstay of health reporting is covering outbreaks of foodborne illness, whether it’s salmonella in peanut butter (and...
View Article‘Short-term’ plans can now be renewed for years
Photo: kengo via Flickr In my most recent post, I recapped what Georgetown University’s Sabrina Corlette, who is also a former Senate health policy aide, told us on an AHCJ webcast about association...
View ArticleIncreased optimism about new Alzheimer’s drugs, tests
Photo: AJ Cann via Flickr You may have recently heard about the multimillion-dollar donation that Bill Gates and Ronald S. Lauder made to support research into biomarkers for early detection of...
View ArticleAustralian physician-journalist offers pearls for health journalists
Norman Swan One of the best ways to become a better health journalist is to find out what the best in the biz are doing — and then make it your own. Great health journalism is happening all over the...
View ArticleAssessing infectious disease risks and impact of social media
Photo: DFID-UK Department for International Development via Wikimedia During an infectious disease outbreak, how does a journalist provide accurate information about risks to the public as the event is...
View ArticleMedia played helpful role in communicating risks during Zika outbreak
Photo: CDCAedes aegypti The news media, for the most part, played a helpful role in communicating the known health risks of the Zika virus to the public during the 2015-16 outbreak, in comparison to...
View ArticleJournalists can learn from these ‘9.5 Theses for a Reformation of...
At the American Academy of Pediatrics annual meeting last fall, I attended a talk by Kevin Powell, M.D., Ph.D., called “Evidence-Based Medicine in a World of Post-Truth and Alternative Facts.” Despite...
View ArticleChronicling the uninsured: A yearlong look that combines policy, narrative
Bloomberg Health reporter John Tozzi has written a terrific “how I did it” essay summing up a yearlong project on Chronicling America’s Uninsured that really delved deeply into who can’t afford health...
View ArticleUpdated Beers Criteria identifies risky drugs for seniors
A panel of experts in geriatric care has identified nearly 100 medications that should be avoided or used with caution among the older population in the latest update to the Beers Criteria for...
View ArticleNew tip sheet, resources on effect sizes help quantify clinical significance
Photo: Esther Dyson via Flickr To effectively report on medical research, you should understand how big a difference that an intervention or an exposure makes. Absolute risk can be the best for this,...
View ArticleProfessor helps journalists report on assessing COVID-19 transmission risks
Photo: New York National Guard via Flickr Scientists now have a much better idea of how people become infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But public health guidelines for how to...
View ArticleHow to be more effective in communicating risk to readers
Photo: Sasha You via Flickr One of the most challenging aspects about reporting on medical research is the need to convey risk in a meaningful way to readers. Human brains are not wired to understand...
View ArticleStudy shows common acid suppressants may increase dementia risk
Photo: Dan Lingard via Flickr Millions of people around the world take acid suppressants called proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) for conditions like heartburn, gastritis and stomach ulcers. Researchers at...
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