The Challenges of Reporting on Health & Medicine

Gary Schwitzer of Health News Review: Any possible contribution I might make to any discussion of health literacy comes from my daily analysis of health news stories and the possible impact they may have on the American public. With that said, I have noticed that there are three recurring problems in many news stories.

Absolute versus relative risk/benefit data

One of our key observations after reviewing more than 1,600 stories over the past 5+ years is that stories tend to exaggerate benefits of interventions and tend to minimize or ignore harms. The problem, in this case, could be filed under both the health literacy and numeracy categories. Many stories use relative risk reduction or benefit estimates without providing the absolute data.

So, in other words, a drug is said to reduce the risk of hip fracture by 50% (relative risk reduction), without ever explaining that it’s a reduction from 2 fractures in 100 untreated women down to 1 fracture in 100 treated women. Yes, that’s 50%, but in order to understand the true scope of the potential benefit, people need to know that it’s only a 1% absolute risk reduction (and that all the other 99 who didn’t benefit still had to pay and still ran the risk of side effects).

Continue reading more at: http://engagingthepatient.com/2011/10/17/how-the-news-media-may-hurt-not-help-health-literacy-efforts/