There's a major problem in health journalism: It's wildly unreliable. As David H. Freedman points out in an excellent critique in the January/ February issue of Columbia Journalism Review, the rate of "overall wrongness" in top medical journals is as much as two thirds--something even the most seasoned science reporters don't point out. The resulting information conveyed to lay readers, is, at best, confusing and, at worst, dead wrong.
But one of those articles has to be the "right" article, doesn't it? One of them has to have the best information. Well, sure, but good luck trying to suss out which one it is in your newspaper or blog of choice when it's not even remotely clear in the medical journals.
And that's only part of the problem, Freedman argues. Science journalists can report flawlessly on a study, painting an accurate picture with multiple, credentialed sources, and still end up transmitting to readers an incomplete message--maybe even a flat-out wrong message--by not letting them in on a fundamental fact: that there is no one tidy answer.
With so much wrong information, scientists and journalists pick whichever wrong study helps them the most, Freedman says. Scientists want their studies to be published and picked up by the media, while journalists want a story that's clear and digestible. But science is messy, and a clear, digestible finding is often (to borrow from another kind of reporting that Freedman mentions) saying about as much as a politician at a press conference.
So there's the upshot: pull a personal health study out of a hat, and it's more likely than not to have major problems. But journalists aren't picking random studies--they're picking the clearest, most engaging, and thus the worst, studies. The system is broken, and this is Freedman's explanation on how to fix it:
A tall order, maybe, but good advice for readers: stay skeptical, and reconsider any life-changing decisions you're making based on studies, whether you read them in a respected journal or a newspaper or, sure, here at Popular Science.
But one last note on all of this. Freedman readily cites where he got his information on the wrongness of studies. He got it from studies. Even if health journalists and readers become more skeptical, there's an old piece of wisdom you can check out the published science on: change is hard.
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Sensationalism sells, duh!
Robot is right, sensationalism sells. Then there are the studies funded by organizations with a special interest in the outcome. Long ago the margarine industry funded studies to show that butter was bad for you. Guess what? Margarine sales went up.
You should take health news with a grain of salt...except too much salt is bad for you...or is it?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=what-science-on-hypertension-really-shows
Bottom line, people who have high blood pressure and are salt-sensitive need to monitor their salt intake. The rest of us can relax. The Internet is a great resource for myth-busting.
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8th grade science teachers tell us that we know almost all there is to know about biology and we're only probing the edges. The truth is that 75% of what we 'know' about biology of higher order life is conjecture.
One proof of this is the fact that prescription drugs have side effects. The drugs 'work' because we have a rudimentary understanding of the system that they are supposed to affect. They fail to work perfectly for the same reason. We are in the 'try it and see what happens' stage.
Not to mention the other white elephant in the room - genetics. Something that works great for one person will have no effect on another due to genetic differences. Certain medicines need to be taken in more copious volumes for some rather then others due to differences in receptor counts etc. An obvious though non medical example is caffiene or stimulants. People have vastly different reactions to them, and not just from constant in take levels... or alcohol - different levels of the enzyme that helps digest it. Metabolic functions greatly effect medicine outcome.