A tool for consumers and physicians alike.

I came across a website that I saw a while back, but forgot about. Check out HealthNewsReview.org. It’s a well done watch-dog website for medical news, which is an incredibly valuable tool, considering the the “In-bed” status of so much of the mass media and the “big business” of health care. Here’s a little about the site in their own words:

What is Health News Review?

HealthNewsReview.org is a website dedicated to:

improving the accuracy of news stories about medical treatments, tests and procedures
helping consumers evaluate the evidence for and against new ideas in health care

We support and encourage the ABCs of health journalism:

Accuracy Balance Completeness

What news stories are reviewed?

HealthNewsReview.org reviews news stories that make a therapeutic claim about:

specific treatments
procedures
investigational drugs or devices
vitamins or nutritional supplements
diagnostic and screening tests

Who conducts the reviews?

A multi-disciplinary team of reviewers from journalism, medicine, health services research and public health assesses the quality of the stories using a standardized rating system. Stories are graded and critiques are published on this website.

HealthNewsRevier.org also has a fine blog, written by Gary Schwitzer of University of Minnesota School of Journalism & Mass Communication. It’s a great read. Here is sample of a recent entry:


Influence of industry on academic medicine

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association gives perhaps the best picture yet of how extensive are industry-academic relationships are in medicine. The authors surveyed department chairs in the 125 accredited allopathic medical schools and the 15 largest independent teaching hospitals in the United States. 67 percent of the 688 eligible department chairs completed the survey.

It showed that "almost two-thirds (60%) of department chairs had some form of personal relationship with industry, including serving as a consultant (27%), a member of a scientific advisory board (27%), a paid speaker (14%), an officer (7%), a founder (9%), or a member of the board of directors (11%). ... More than two-thirds of chairs perceived that having a relationship with industry had no effect on their professional activities, 72% viewed a chair's engaging in more than 1 industry-related activity (substantial role in a start-up company, consulting, or serving on a company's board) as having a negative impact on a department's ability to conduct independent unbiased research."

The authors concluded:

"Failure to address the existence and influence of industry relationships with academic institutions could endanger the trust of the public in US medical schools and teaching hospitals."

The Associated Press reports:

Dr. Jerome Kassirer, a former New England Journal of Medicine editor and frequent critic of industry influence over doctors, called the study eye-opening.

"I was appalled by the results," Kassirer said. "No one knew that so many chairs of medicine and psychiatry were paid speakers. We've never had that data before."

-WJ