Why the medical media goes overboard

I have previously ranted about medical articles being overhyped. Respectable newspapers will use sensationalized headlines. Findings sometimes receive an overenthusiastic response. This writer explains why – Health, Hope and Hype: Why the Media Oversells Medical ‘Breakthroughs’

Forgive me if I sound cynical. It’s just that, as a journalist, I’m a recently reformed hope pusher myself. The medical stories I used to write always had a strong element of hope, and the same goes for the majority of the articles produced by my colleagues around the country, who collectively serve as a kind of pep squad for biomedical research and medicine.

Here are just a few headlines from an Internet search that turned up 939 stories containing the words “breakthrough” and “medicine” from the month of June alone: “Saving Lives with Living Machines,” from Technology Review; “Beat the Clock: Local Scientists May Be on the Verge of a Cancer Breakthrough,” in Washingtonian; “Life Saver; There’s a Revolutionary Blood Test That Can Predict the Future,” in the London Mirror. With all those breakthroughs, you’d think nobody would have to die of cancer any more and we should all be running marathons into our eighties.

But we aren’t running marathons in our eighties and we are still dying of cancer and heart disease and you name it. Do you think maybe that’s because a lot of what passes as medical journalism contains a bit of hype?

This issue came into sharp relief for me in 1998 during the flap that ensued after the New York Times printed a story about the potential for new compounds known as “anti-angiogenic factors” to treat cancer. The story appeared on a Sunday, on the front page, above the fold, and it quoted Jim Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, saying, cancer would be cured “in two years.” This was a patently ridiculous prediction, and any reporter who has ever interviewed Watson is well aware that he — how shall I put this? — has been know to shoot from the hip. But lots of readers and editors didn’t know that. Later the New York Times would say it was shocked, shocked, when headlines around the world blared “Cancer Cure,” stock prices of half a dozen biotech companies with patents on the compounds hit the stratosphere, and cancer patients clogged the phone lines of every oncologist and cancer center in the country, begging for a shot at the new miracle drugs.

In reality, the compounds hadn’t yet been tested on a single human being, and they existed in such tiny quantities that there was scarcely enough to treat a few cancer-ridden mice. That meant that dozens of medical writers around the country, including me, would spend the week pulling together stories to set the record straight and disabuse readers of the notion that anti-angiogenic factors were going to cure anybody’s cancer any time soon.

And yet, when the time came to decide how to package the magazine story that a colleague and I had written, somebody hit on the bright idea of running a photo of the breed of mouse that was used in the experiments, under the words, “Meet the Mouse That Beat Cancer.” When we writers objected that this headline would further fuel the hype, the editors added “A Cure?” With that, the cover was printed with a wink and nod to what we all knew: Hope sells magazines.

So after reading the entire piece, I am not sure whether the problem lies with the writers or with the editors. The medical blog world – growing and hopefully becoming more important – tries to put these articles into perspective.

The longer one practices, the more careful one becomes when interpreting new studies. The perspective of time provides one with many examples over overhyped findings, diagnostic tests and drugs. This long view makes one look a bit more carefully at the data. We tend to ask more critical questions (although we are trying to teach this healthy skepticism to our trainees).

Perhaps the medical blog community should provide a consortium to place these stories into perspective. Perhaps we already do.