Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2287

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Smith DE, Wilson AJ, Henry DA.
Monitoring the quality of medical news reporting: early experience with media doctor.
Med J Aust 2005 Aug 15; 183:(4):190-3
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/183_04_150805/smi10755_fm.html

Abstract:

OBJECTIVE: To analyse the reviews of medical news articles posted on media doctor, a medical news-story monitoring website.

DESIGN AND SETTING: A descriptive summary of operating the media doctor website between 1 February and 1 September 2004.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Consensus scores for 10 assessment criteria for the medical intervention described in the article (novelty, availability in Australia, alternative treatment options given, evidence of “disease mongering”, objective supportive evidence given, quantification of benefits, coverage of harms, coverage of costs, independent sources of information, and excessive reliance on a press release); cumulative article rating scores for major media outlets.

RESULTS: 104 news articles were featured on media doctor in the study period. Both online and print media scored poorly, although the print media were superior: mean total scores 56.1% satisfactory for print and 40.1% for online; percentage points difference 15.9 (95% CI, 8.3-23.6). The greatest differences were seen for the use of independent information sources, quantification of benefits and coverage of potential harms.

CONCLUSIONS: Australian lay news reporting of medical advances, particularly by the online news services, is poor. This might improve if journals and researchers became more active in communicating with the press and the public.

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts

If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Announcements

PharmedOut’s annual conference: Missing The Target: When Practitioners Harm More Than Heal

No Free Lunch is merging with Healthy Skepticism

Conference program: Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge

Prescrire’s proposals for France’s national conference on medicines policy

Pharmed Out Conference ‘Pharma Knows Best? Managing Medical Knowledge’

More announcements

What's new on this site

Library Home

Library Search

Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909