TV news often gets health stories wrong
The National Public Radio program “On the Media” spent much of its time this past weekend looking at health-related stories, including the conclusion by Gary Schwitzer of Health News Review that it’s a waste of time for his website to review stories about health from television because they so often get so much wrong.
Schwitzer said in a note on his website that the state of health reporting on TV has always been bad and it’s just gotten worse over the years. The site gives articles a star rating on a scale of one to five, and of the 228 stories from television the site has reviewed in the past three and a half years, the average rating has been 2.1 stars.
ABC’s “Good Morning America” and CBS’ “The Early Show” had the poorest showing, with average scores of 1.8 each. The best broadcast (if you can call it that) in terms of accuracy is “NBC Nightly News,” which managed an average score of 2.7.
Of all the stories ever reviewed on the site, 40 have gotten no stars at all, and 27 of those — or 68 percent — came from network television reports.
Schwitzer complained that stories often left out the necessary context of studies, such as what the potential harms of a weight loss drug combo might be or the fact that a study being presented as a breakthrough was conducted in rats instead of humans.
The perils of cyberchondria
Another issue covered on the broadcast was cyberchondria, the affliction of Googling your health problem only to jump to the conclusion that you’ve got a dread disease rather than something more basic.
A Washington Post columnist shared her battle with the problem, which involved self-diagnosing an eyelid twitch as either multiple sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Carolyn Butler says the more you read about your symptom, the more likely you are to think of what’s probably no big deal as being a potentially fatal problem.
She notes that studies have found a third of people who search online for health problems tend to escalate their searches from the basics to more serious diseases, and she likened the problem to the issue of medical students thinking they have some horrible fatal disease as they learn about it in their studies.
As it turns out, Butler wasn’t dying, she was allergic to an ingredient in an eye cream she had recently started using.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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I don’t think it’s that the media get health stories wrong, it’s that they give us the most attention-grabbing angle of a story without the background facts to put it into perspective. This is especially true of nutrition news. For example, the contradictory studies about high-protein vs. high-carb diets. Of course, we’re partly to blame – we don’t have the attention span for more details.
I went to a lecture by a biologist (on aging) last night, and his opinion is that most of the news we hear is very oversimplified at best, and often misrepresented, and generally mostly soundbyte, designed to catch attention. He thinks SciAm does a good job, not impressed with others.